‘The Winterpoor’ Offers Glimpse Of The Real Cape Cod

Many visitors to Cape Cod, even long-time summer visitors, have a certain, shall we say, sunny vision of Cape Cod.

Maybe that vision encompasses family time on the beaches, in fun galleries, shops and restaurants. But to a different subset of residents, those places are alien.

 These are the people we meet in “The Winterpoor” (Sea Crow Press, 2025), prize-winning author George Michelsen Foy’s 14th novel. Foy said in an email interview last week that “The Winterpoor” is a “particularly important” novel to him.

 “I’ve written about home before,” says Foy, who has deep Cape Cod roots. Born in Cape Cod Hospital, he now lives in Cotuit while teaching creative writing at New York University. “But this one kinda digs deep into what I love about home, and what troubles me about it, too.”

 One thing that troubles Foy about Cape Cod is the economics of making a living here while raising a family. For a time, Foy was employed as a commercial fisherman out of Chatham. But his circumstances changed, both in his private life and in the fishing world, making it untenable.

 “Which leads me to what I’d like readers to take away from the novel: what the real Cape is like, not the summer parties and beaches but what it feels like to live here year round, both in summertime when there’s plenty of work and, yeah, parties, and in the off-season when the summer people leave, and the days shorten and the wind blows colder and colder and the damn junk car won’t start,” he says. “Of course, you could usually score a cheaper winter rental, which you’d have to vacate by Memorial Day.”

 This is the darker, grittier Cape Cod that the cast of characters in “The Winterpoor” inhabit.

 The novel is divided into four sections that follow the seasons. In the spring we meet Murdo Peters as he restores a 19th century harbor scow. The scow, which belonged to an early 20th century artist named Eby Noble (based loosely on the Provincetown painter John Noble) will be used in a new marine art school.

Joining Murdo one day is a peculiar boy nicknamed “Boy.” “The kid’s body, like the face, is chubby-lank, puppy fat glued on baling wire.” Boy is also filthy. And he may, as it turns out, suffer from some type of neurological condition that causes him to mispronounce almost everything. But Boy is also gifted with hand tools such as drills and can help Murdo with the restoration. Still, within minutes of their first meeting it turns out that Boy is wanted by the police for “attacking” someone’s car. Murdo, though, is not a man disposed to help the police. After this, Boy comes in regularly to assist Murdo with the boat.

 Murdo feels some responsibility toward Boy, and more than once he tries to talk to Boy’s parents or guardians. This brings him to one of those neighborhoods not highlighted by the Chamber of Commerce brochures: the Winterpoor, an “area of rotting cottages off Sea Street.” Objects on the front lawn of Boy’s home are mainly “rusted to hell.” Emerging from the front door is Boy’s foster care mother with green eyes “so sharp that you look away for fear of getting cut.”

 The people who live in the Winterpoor work each summer cleaning houses, waiting tables, and clerking nights in motels. Simply put, “In winter, the work dries up.” In the winter there are Goodwill sneakers, SNAP and WIC vouchers, the ER, booze, B&E, meth and opioids and drug dealing. “The Barnstable Police Department pays more attention to what goes on in the Winterpoor than to activities in other parts of town,” Foy writes. It turns out that Boy’s blood relatives, too, live in the Winterpoor.

 Foy contends that “the Winterpoor” exists in many Cape towns. “Everywhere there’s a neighborhood of little cottages away from beaches, ponds, business districts.

 “I wanted to make the Winterpoor representative of all those neighborhoods,” he adds. “The name, ‘The Winterpoor,’ is, of course, symbolic, representing those riding the whipsaw, boom-bust economy of a resort area in which winter is the lean time.”

 Murdo’s life changes when his sister-in-law Daisy leaves her husband Cooch and moves in with him and his wife of six-and-one-half years, Una. Murdo’s alliances among the relatives shift. He befriends a raccoon.

 Murdo’s own circle of friends are people whose entire life histories he knows. Some of these characters are based on real people who Foy hopes to “give voice to.” And Foy wants his readers to see “how cool the people here are.”

 Among these are “old line fishermen and boat-Yankees,” “an old Cape Verdean bar owner, one of the wisest people I’ve ever known,” “and the hard-working Brazilians and West Indians.” He adds to this group “the artists and writers (count me in) spending years trying to do their thing while working different jobs to survive.”

 But the time “The Winterpoor” reaches its final chapter and season, winter, the poverty, the extreme weather, the abuse Boy is suffering all culminate in a climactic drama. “The Winterpoor” has been praised by such bestselling writers as Anne D. LeClaire of Chatham and William Martin.