The Nine Planets
Edward Riche’s The Nine Planets opens with an image that signals the context for what follows in the rest of the narrative: Riche’s protagonist Marty Devereaux contemplates two melting ice sculptures, of Viking Leif Ericson and the old tricoloured flag beloved of despondent Newfoundland nationalists. The thematic note—that history and heritage are very much in the descendant—is rung again and again throughout the narrative, as Riche emphasizes how Newfoundland’s fate is being reshaped by the forces of globalization. At the heart of the conflict in The Nine Planets is a proposed development of the pristine Perroqueet Downs just outside St. John’s, a project in which Marty—the vice-principal of the tony private school The Red Pines—becomes increasingly implicated.
As in Rare Birds, The Nine Planets chronicles the implosion of a middle-aged male protagonist, as Marty’s professional and romantic fortunes spiral downwards over the course of the novel. Contemptuous of his adolescent charges and enviously scathing of their affluent parents, and reaching a parting of ways with Henry Landrigan, his friend and co-founder of the school, whose increasing embrace of progressive causes Marty scoffs at, Marty is seduced by developer George Hayden’s vision of a global franchise of portable private schools, seeing it as a way out of his professional cul-de-sac. Marty’s attempt to run with the big dogs, and Hank’s public efforts to resist them, increasingly complicate Marty’s management of affairs at The Red Pines. As in Rare Birds, this fork in Marty’s career has its counterpart in a fork in the romantic road, as bachelor Marty’s years-long relationship with the school music teacher Sophie Zwitzer has grown stale, stunted by Marty’s lack of charisma and commitment. After meeting his sister-in-law Meredith’s friend and neighbor Jackie Spurrell, Marty fantasizes about the possibility of an illicit liaison with Jackie, who is married to the heavily medicated Ted, a recovering alcoholic like Marty’s failed playwright brother Rex.
Though Riche’s portrait of the politics of private school and of real-estate development in St. John’s on the eve of Y2K has much the same sardonic touch as Rare Birds, a couple of factors impart a very different feel to the novel. First of all, though Marty is, like Dave Purcell, steaming towards a personal and professional mid-life crisis, he is a much less endearing character, reserved, cynically pragmatic, and fairly reactionary. This gives the novel a more complicated satirical flavour, as Riche skewers Marty’s anal retentiveness and cynical opportunism, but also the many recipients of Marty’s own disdain, including the St. John’s elite and their children, environmentalists and those who support progressive causes, Newfoundland nationalists and those who celebrate its history and heritage, and the St. John’s arts and culture scene. The result is some wicked but also ambivalent satire, because of the ambiguity of Riche’s endorsement of Marty’s caustic take on the world around him.
The other key difference is that the novel has a second protagonist, Marty’s niece Cathy, Rex and Meredith’s disaffected adolescent daughter. Though Cathy plays a much smaller role than Marty, her experiences contribute a good deal to Riche’s complex sociology and geography of St. John’s. Riche’s deft characterization of Cathy’s ennui serves as a nice counterpoint to Marty’s middle-age crisis, as she navigates between the rock of social conformity and the hard place of social exclusion, finally recognizing adolescent disaffection for the conformity it can be, as circumstances increasingly compel her—like her uncle—out of her caustic self-absorption.
The Nine Planets is somewhat reminiscent of novels like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, in that it conveys the jaded perspective of Marty as he reflects upon the faculty and students of The Red Pines, and the novel is filled with deftly wicked thumbnail sketches and sardonic commentary on the institutional politics of the private school, such as Riche’s portrait of the pompous English teacher Abe Summers, who darns his tattered ego by seeing himself as the school’s writer-in-residence, or the depiction of the beautiful but talentless art teacher who is effectively no more than an objet d’art. Riche’s style is succinct, sharp and richly satiric, punctuated with brilliant descriptions such as Marty’s vision of backup singers on music videos with “asses quivering like paint shakers.” Though at times it seems that Riche may have too much on his palette in the novel, The Nine Planets is a complex, and richly comic, portrait of post-recovery Newfoundland.