BIDDEFORD, Maine — Seated at a table inside a huge former textile mill which once rang out with thousands of French-speaking voices, Ron Currie Jr. issued a challenge: Name this country’s most famous Franco-American author.
Most people, Currie said, can’t even name a single one, let alone the best-known.
“It’s Jack Kerouac,” he said. “He was from Lowell, Massachusetts. His real name was Jean-Louis.”
The truth is, Currie admits, that unlike Irish, Italian and Jewish-Americans, the century-old French-Canadian immigrant experience of living, working, struggling and occasionally triumphing in Anglo-dominated New England mill towns has rarely garnered any serious literary exploration, especially in English. But with his latest novel, “The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne,” the proud Franco-American, aims to start rectifying that situation.
Set in Currie’s hometown of Waterville and with some inspiration from his own beloved grandmother, the book centers on a group of solid-seeming, elderly, French-speaking women, all friends since childhood. The title character and ringleader, Babs Dionne, is a classic Franco “memere” who runs her household and dotes on her grandchildren.
But Dionne is also a vicious crime matriarch and drug kingpin who rules Waterville’s underworld without mercy, capable of putting the beatdown on unsuspecting men twice her size.
As the story unfolds, one of Dionne’s daughters is murdered by a mysterious hitman from Massachusetts. At the same time, another daughter, Lori, a dishonorably discharged Marine who uses drugs to escape her PTSD, wants nothing to do with the family business.
“I intend the book to be, first and foremost, a rip-roaring story that really moves,” Currie said. “But, at the same time, I want it to be almost a time capsule.”
The story takes place in the last days of Waterville’s historic “Little Canada” neighborhood, when many still spoke French and everyone’s family worked at the Hathaway shirt factory or Scott paper mill.
Born in 1975, Currie is just old enough to remember those days.
The organized crime part of his story is fictional, he maintains, but the rest, with its crooked cops, secretive priests and double standards — one for the Anglos and one for the French — is all true.
“I’m approaching 50 years old, and there are times when I’m like, did I make all that up?” the author of five previous books said. “Because it’s so gone — part of the reason I wrote the book was to create a record that this world actually existed.”
Though he has a Scottish surname, Currie considers himself Quebecois to the bone. His family — like thousands of others — arrived in Maine more than a century ago, coming down from Canada, looking for work and a better life in New England’s burgeoning shoe, textile, pulp and paper mills.
But Currie is a member of the “skipped” generation of Franco-Mainers, who became disconnected from their culture when their parents didn’t pass down their birthright language. At the time, it was seen as a liability, rather than a proud resource. For decades, assimilation was strongly encouraged by the dominant, English-speaking culture.
In the 1920s, Maine’s French Catholics were hounded by the Ku Klux Klan. French was forbidden in public schools. By the mid-20th century, many of New England’s French names became Anglicized, losing their proper accents and morphing into English equivalents. Bourque became Burke, Marquis became Markee and Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac became Jack Kerouac.
It’s only in the last 20 years that Maine’s long-running stereotype of the “dumb Frenchman” has begun to perish in popular culture. Currie created Babs and her proud, violent, French-speaking crew to help it die even faster.
“I wanted someone who would fiercely defend the language and the culture, would call Anglos and Protestants to account for the ways that they treated Franco people,” Currie said. “I was looking for a hero for Franco culture who didn’t exist — so I created her.”
Besides French culture, the author also wants to pay some attention to Maine’s less picturesque locales, far from the sea, lighthouses and lobster boats.
“Where I grew up, it might as well have been Nebraska. I never saw the ocean,” Currie said. “The Maine I recognize, that I love, has no representation in popular culture.”
That will soon change.
Putnam is publishing Currie’s new book in March and has already ordered 75,000 copies. Additionally, the publisher recently greenlit a pair of sequels. Currie is now deep into writing his second Babs Dionne story.
Currie is at pains to point out that, while he may be creating a new Franco-American literary genre, his main thrust is just to tell a good story.
“If you start with an ax to grind, you’re going to write a lousy story,” he said. “Insofar as I’m willing to admit that it was wish fulfillment at all, it’s more just the desire for [Babs] to exist.”
“The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne” is now available for preorder.
