Robert Grainier

Grainier is the novella’s central character and protagonist. The book is, in many ways, the story of what he knows of his life. The narrative portrays him as an orphan, with only the barest hints of his origins. Those hints come from a variety of different sources and are themselves inconsistent, so that the story Grainier comes to believe about himself and his origins is as fragmented and as pieced together as the story told by the novella after his death. The family-told story of his beginnings is as piecemeal as the author-told story of his life as a whole.

That story is one of a man that the narrative seems designed to portray as hard-working, uncomplicated, and emotional without being overly demonstrative. In that sense, he can be seen as something of an archetype, a representation of what was arguably, for many years, a masculine...