SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Ron Currie's new novel, "The Savage, Noble Death Of Babs Dionne," is set in a French-speaking section of Waterville called Little Canada. What's it like?
RON CURRIE: (Reading) You would have said Little Canada had seen better days, except it never really had - different days, sure, but not better. Everyone had more trouble than money when Babs was a girl, and everyone had more trouble than money now. People work too hard for too little when Babs was a girl, and people work too hard for too little now. Back then, beer and rotgut liquor flowed through the gutters. These days, it was heroin, and so on. Poor was poor and remained so, and the rest was just calendar dates and details.
SIMON: That's Ron Currie, the author. And his character Babs Dionne is a devoted grandmother, tough-loving mother, and she happens to be a mobster who controls the supply of drugs into Little Canada. But competition appears, and her youngest daughter, Sis, is found dead. It's the latest novel from Ron Currie. He's also a screenwriter and teaches at the University of Southern Maine. He joins us now from Portland, Maine. Thanks so much for being with us.
CURRIE: So great to be here, Scott. Thank you.
SIMON: And Babs Dionne is, at least in part, inspired by your grandmother?
CURRIE: She is. I've sort of been hedging my bets and saying that Babs is a tribute to the spirit of my grandmother, lest anybody should think that my grandmother was actually a criminal. She wasn't. But she was pretty gangster.
SIMON: (Laughter).
CURRIE: And as such, I thought that she would serve as a good template for a character like this.
SIMON: Yeah. I made a note of one of your phrases - we said of Babs, if you loved like she does, it would break you.
SIMON: That was my experience of Franco women, in general, when I was a kid. The phrase that I've been using, that's not in the book, but I like it a lot is that they have molten love where their bone marrow is supposed to be. And it was very much a matriarchal environment that I grew up in by simple dint of the fact that the men were never around. They were either at work, at the bar or in their graves. And as such, women ran the show. And that's why Babs and her girlfriends in the book, you know, they run the rackets in Waterville, and they have bent local politicians and the police department to their ends. It's just sort of an extension of the matriarchal control that I experienced as a kid in that community.
SIMON: There's a horrifying event in Babs' past and early in the novel when she's 14 - a rape and murder. She has blood on her hands, if not her conscience. A priest comes through in a surprising way, doesn't he?
CURRIE: Yeah, Father Clement. Father Clement does what the church used to do during that generation and before. When somebody got into trouble, the church made them disappear under certain circumstances - just spirited them away, basically, right? That's what Father Clement does for Babs. And then she comes back five years later when the heat's off, and that's really the moment when she sort of claims her crown. She - the story of what she did to the cop has, of course, become legend in her absence. And the idea that somebody is almost supernatural in their ability to control things and should not be crossed.
SIMON: Babs, if we may, stabbed a police officer who assaulted her.
CURRIE: Yes, that's right.
SIMON: You sort of see Babs Dionne as kind of a generational link in a chain of women that go back to 17th century France.
CURRIE: Like many of us, Franco Americans were descended from a relatively small group of women who were known as the King's Daughters. And they were brought to what was then, New France, what we know is Canada now, for the sole purpose of populating the colony. They took a bunch of women who didn't have much in the way of prospects otherwise and brought them here to be incubators.
And in the book, the sort of family line between one of those women and Babs is articulated at the very beginning. One of the central ideas in the book is sort of articulated through that process - the idea that we're not discreet, blank-slate individuals. Were actually the accumulation of all the choices that preceded us in life.
SIMON: Well, tell us about Lori, her daughter - Babs' daughter.
CURRIE: The relationship between Lori and Babs is sort of classic, in that they're cut from exactly the same cloth. They're equally tough. They're equally stubborn. And as such, they're working together and against each other, sometimes simultaneously.
SIMON: And, of course, when we meet Lori, she's in the middle of - well, I'll get you to describe it.
CURRIE: When we meet Lori, she's dead. She's lying on the floor of a bar or bathroom, and she's just overdosed.
SIMON: I have to ask, how can a - God bless her - a drug kingpin like Babs be surprised, or even shattered, when her own daughter becomes addicted?
CURRIE: That's a fair question. I don't think that she's surprised, but I do think that she is dismayed. I mean, Babs, I think, expects that her own kids will be as tough and principled and stoic as she is. And, of course, nobody can be. Babs is supernatural in her self-control. She doesn't tolerate what she perceives as weakness in other people very well.
SIMON: Tell us about the difference people in Little Canada see between American and (impersonating French accent) American.
CURRIE: Yeah. Well, it's an argument that Lori has with her own older brother on 9/11. Her older brother Jean immediately goes to enlist in the army. And Lori thinks, and Babs also thinks that that's a terrible idea for any number of reasons. Not least, she and her people - Franco Americans - were the Anglo establishment, and the United States was happy to use them as plow horses. But they were never going to be given a fair shake in this society. And as such, Babs' attitude is, why would we fight for it? And that - you know, to me, it's sort of a microcosm of the riddle of America, right? Like, we're all American and not all at the same time. And I think that makes for interesting interpersonal dynamics. But it also, as a nation - I think it makes us very powerful but also sort of unruly and difficult to govern.
SIMON: How did you like spending time in this world?
CURRIE: Oh, God. It was almost a relief, Scott, because that world that I grew up in is so completely gone now that there have been times, as I approach 50 this year, that I sort of have this sense that I made it up, that it never really existed. And, of course, it did, and I have confirmation of that everywhere if I want it. But it's sort of - that part of my life, I'm so thoroughly anglicized and secularized now that it feels like a fantasy or a phantom limb, and it haunts me. And I wanted to be able to make a version of a record of that world before my memories were too fuzzy to do so.
SIMON: Ron Currie's new novel, "The Savage, Noble Death Of Babs Dionne." Thank you so much for being with us.
CURRIE: Thank you, Scott. My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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