Sundowning is a term that geriatric caregivers use to describe the dementia that plagues many elderly people at sunset. Their grasp on reality is tenuous during the day; at dusk, the shadows play tricks on their eyes, nothing looks like what it really is. They become disoriented and confused.
Sundowning explores the inner life of a family in small town Ontario, but not in the typical Canadiana small-brown-bird-dying-in-the-snow elegiac way. This is the real small town Ontario, where teenagers go to pit parties and know the code to order pot from the local pizza parlour. This is a family falling apart in a million different ways.
Every member of the Shelby family is disoriented and confused in his own way. Families are stitched together with the white lies we tell one another. One slip, and the whole construction falls down. Doug Shelby, volunteer firefighter, goes into a burning building on Mill Street and comes out a broken man. When he slips from his rôle as head of household, it becomes apparent that his relationship with his family was reliant on his absence. With him around the house, the balance shifts, the family flounders. His daughter goes on a quest for badness. His son goes on a quest for goodness, which is even worse. His wife tries to eradicate all emotion from her thoughts. Doug can't even acknowledge their difficulties; he's too busy trying to escape the memories of the fire that crippled him. The only thing that soothes his nerves is watching his old colleagues fight fires, and imagining that he is somehow helping them. Of course, Doug isn't really helping anybody.
The story takes place over the course of one summer, starting around Victoria Day when cottage season begins. For the most part, the cottagers pay no attention to Auckland, where the Shelbys live; it's just another town on the highway, not quite quaint enough to bother stopping, unless you happen to be running low on gas. The locals resent but depend on the weekenders; the weekenders are only vaguely aware of the locals. Just seeing their endless taillights on the highway makes Doug's blood boil. It makes his daughter Carrie's blood boil in a different way. Her brother Keith resents the way Carrie seems to get away with badness (for a while, at least), while his efforts at goodness go ignored. But Keith isn't as pure of heart as he likes to think. Their mother Sheila tries to ignore them both equally, along with her husband.
Meanwhile, there is an arsonist at work in Auckland. Every week, another barn burns down. Is it the work of the same man who set fire to that building on Mill Street? Doug's obsession with fire threatens to take over the house -- the fire department scanner he's held on to from his days as a volunteer moves upstairs to the dining table, filling rooms with its crackle and hum. At his wife's insistence, they move the scanner to his big old car, a gas-guzzling Grand Marquis that's the size of a school bus, and Doug spends his days driving country roads, waiting to catch a radio signal that will tell him something is wrong. But is he really helping, or is he just kidding himself?
While Doug wrestles with this question, Carrie experiments with sex and drugs, Keith experiments with self-help books and herbal tea, and Sheila experiments with Corian countertops. Things can't go on like this.
