Wayne Johnston paints frozen landscapes, Margaret Atwood creates dystopias, Barbara Gowdy explores obsession.

But if you want to know about outsiders, then David Adams Richards is your man. In close to 20 novels (including the Giller-winning Mercy Among the Children), Richards has created a corps of memorable outcasts from Madonna in The Bay of Love and Sorrows to Sydney Henderson in Mercy to Janie McLeary King and her son Miles in his new novel, River of the Brokenhearted.

Richards's gift is to make these people human in their resiliency and fragility and to transform them from the pitiable to the iconic. He does it, I think, by the moral force of his vision, the absolute sincerity of his voice and his uncanny ability to internalize the rough majesty of the Miramichi in his native New Brunswick into his rich cast of characters. His mode is tragedy, but there is humour -- even if blackly satirical -- sneaking out of the shadows.

I didn't know David Adams Richards in his drinking days -- those who did say he was a quiet, dogged drunk -- but I wonder about them every time I meet him or read one of his novels. There is a residue of misery in his eyes and in the set of his jaw as he works away on a piece of gum and resolutely sips at a glass of pop at a party.

He's created so many drunks in his fiction -- from hopeless to righteous, from hyperbolic to the eloquent Miles King in the new novel -- that he has become a virtuoso of inebriation. There is a revealing scene near the end of River, for example, between Miles and his son "Wendy," the story's hard-drinking narrator. Miles says: "It is impossible to drink with you -- you are not a drinker, I find, and you have a limited conversational ability -- and the reason is simply this, Wendy -- after three or four days of drinking you sneak away for some food."

That insight comes from personal experience. Richards has written about his own addiction to drink, drugs and nicotine in an emotional powerhouse of an essay in the collection Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. "When I was little," he wrote, "drink surrounded me as rivers did fish. . . . [It] coaxed me gently with its timeless serenade, told me that it would wait, bide its time, and be there whenever I turned to embrace it."

All in all, it seemed reasonable, when we met up late last week to talk about the new book, to ask him how significant his own drinking is to the characters and situations he creates. He started smoking as a very young child and drinking at 14.

The same December he was given Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens for Christmas. He loved reading and he loved drinking and he discovered that he loved doing both of them alone. Those weren't the only things that made him a little different from the other boys growing up along the banks of the Miramichi.

Richards's mother fell when she was seven months pregnant, and he was born prematurely. He didn't speak until he was 3, he walks with a limp and his left arm is permanently weakened. Still, he learned to fish and to play hockey, evidence of the determination that helped him give up drinking and smoking 21 years ago, when he was 32. How was he able to do something that defeated Miles, a talented magician, musician and lover of literature?

"I had a friend who weighed 260 pounds throw me in a car and take me to AA," he said chewing his habitual piece of gum as we sat at the board table in the Toronto offices of Doubleday, his publishers.

Richards had been on a three-month drunk. He had almost drained the bank account he had with his wife Peg (his partner since they were teenagers in the Miramichi) and he knew somewhere in his delirium that if he didn't stop drinking he wouldn't be able to write any more and probably wouldn't be alive to see 40. Still, he did not go willingly to Alcoholics Anonymous.

He owed his friend a favour so he went to the meeting, even though he knew it was "going to be crap." Eventually he realized that he could do it one day at a time. It was either give up drinking or quit writing.

"I love to drink and have a good time," he says, adding with a chuckle, "I spent enough money on it to have a good time. I smoked three packs a day when I gave up and, boy, was that ever difficult."

He has wanted for a long time to write this novel, which is based largely on his grandmother Janie's successful struggle to establish a cinema franchise in Newcastle, N.B., in the 1920s and 1930s. He put it off partly because he had other books to write and partly to wait until after his father died.

"Miles is very different from my father, and my mother was not like Elizabeth Whispers at all, but there are things about the Drive-in and the Uptown theatre" -- he pronounces it the-Atre in his New Brunswick twang -- "that are pretty close." There is nothing sentimental about his portrait of his hard-headed grandmother, who outwits the local cronies to secure the first-run distribution rights to talkies. She had to be that tough, he says. "They did try to foreclose on her, they did try to bomb her out, she did get the money from a lumber baron" -- not Beaverbrook, as he says in the novel.

River is a very ambitious work. It falls short of the stark moral paradigm of Mercy, but it carries a subtler, more complex message. The book, which is structured around two matriarchs -- Janie the builder and Rebecca Druken the destroyer -- is built as snugly as a Carpenter Gothic chapel. All the familiar themes are here -- Richards's distrust of religious dogma (traditional and New Age), his hatred of hypocrisy and his belief in the power of individual faith to transform evil into good.

Richards is tired, now that the book has been birthed, and he thinks that he has only one more novel in him. That last book will build on a quote from Thomas Merton that is in the front of River: "Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you." The only character he knows for certain will be in the book is John Delano, the policeman who has made appearances in several of Richards's novels.

Delano had left the area years before, having badly used one of Richards's favourite characters and he wants to let him come back to atone and to meet up with another castoff. "That is in my mind and if I get that done, then maybe I will say that is enough," he says.

You mean you are going to stop writing, I ask incredulously. Of course not, he admits with a jolt. He's more addicted to writing than he ever was to drink. He's just pausing to get a second wind.

David Adams Richards reads from River of the Brokenhearted on globeandmail.com