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Vandal Love
By D.Y. Béchard
Doubleday Canada, 341, $29.95

It's a pleasure to see another entry in the rare category of imaginative or magic realist works penned by the current generation of French Canadians or those descended from French Canadians. All have roots in Montreal, though the most famous of them, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, is not set at home. Toronto Star literary critic Philip Marchand has said that it's natural that magic realism should spring out of Quebec's Roman Catholic culture, which is a Latin American heritage, after all. And this very narrow field is characterized as much by how it differs from the pleasures we expect from a Salman Rushdie or a Gabriel García Márquez as by how much it resembles them.

Now here is something new again.

Vandal Love is the mongrel fictional debut of an American-Canadian writer with roots in Quebec, a childhood in British Columbia and a peripatetic history. Accordingly, the book's themes swing vertiginously between the quest for roots and belonging and the need for an escape from a stifling reality or an impossible family. It addresses fictionally the French Canadian Diaspora in North America, calling obliquely on Jack Kerouac for inspiration. Yet D.Y. Béchard surpasses Kerouac in his consciousness of the French as part of a larger people, how their struggle is socially and politically situated rather than strictly personal.

Although the fantastic or magic realist elements are present from the start, this book bears little relationship to the kind of thing one expects from Rushdie or García Márquez. There's little exuberance, little sense of the manic possibilities of life, no humour. All the relationships fail, perhaps only because everyone seems to expect it. The characters' travels are not just wanderings, they are abandonments, and this pattern repeats itself across the generations.

It begins with the patriarch, Hervé Hervé, a hard-bitten, rural, one-eyed man who scorns those neighbours who join the French-Canadian exodus from poverty. His children are alternately born either large or small, and the book is divided into telling first of the giants and then the runts. Book One follows Jude Hervé, abandoned by his mother and trained by his grandfather to fight his neighbours. Jude's odyssey across North America as a boxer fails to make him happy, however, so he gives up a promising career to retreat into fatherhood and alcoholism.

His daughter, also raised motherless, enters into a loveless marriage that is shattered when another part-French Canadian appears and the two fall awkwardly in love. By contrast, Book II follows the runts, tracking missing fathers and traversing spiritual quests. In either case, broken families stimulate the character's longings for a sense of home, which fails to arrive even with a return to Quebec.

The style is not fabulist. No tripping rhythms, no puns or jokes, no authorial intrusions, no variety in tone or pace. Instead, this is writing as it is taught in universities, with short, declarative sentences stripped bare of adjective or nuance. In theory, this allows scene and character to reveal themselves, but in practice, it much more often attempts to conjure profundity from sentimentality. Nevertheless, this marriage of imaginative material with a strictly "literary" approach is new, and perfectly supports the reality of a nation of poor, overworked, overcrowded yet passionate and life-loving Latins.

Vandal Love seems like a trans-generational On the Road, which, also infused with a kind of inherited defeatism, was the perfect Americanized expression of an unexamined Existentialism, the ultimate Beat utterance. But for Kerouac, as for Jude, one of the main protagonists of Vandal Love, even his success failed to conquer the curse of the defeated French Canadian male, and he died an early, ignoble death.

What makes this novel Canadian is its sense of community and family as destiny, as opposed to the Americans' slavish veneration of individualism. What makes it American is its refusal to engage with the politics of language. Although the action takes place over a wide swath of North America, largely outside Quebec, the novel's French-born characters simply learn English when they have to, without any angst or any bearing on their lives, as if the fact of French was merely a narrative inconvenience, which the author disposes of early and then ignores. In this sense, these poor rural families of the Gaspé could just as easily have been farmers of the U.S. Dustbowl during the Depression.

Partly this is so because the focus of the book is interior. Despite their travels, these characters are anything but worldly, taking little notice of whatever surroundings they find themselves in. This extends to a peculiar lack of motivation on the part of the viewpoint characters. Few take conscious action; rather, life happens to them. And when faced with a crisis demanding some kind of action, their usual reaction is flight.

Loveless marriages, lack of engagement or interest in the world, acceptance of the whims of fate and alcoholism are the recurring patterns of this novel. The Conquest and the flight of so many French to the United States instills a fatalism born of defeat and poverty. There's little dramatization, and in part one, what little dialogue exists is presented without quotation marks, so as not to distinguish it from the narration. No humour or change in tone or atmosphere presents itself on any page.

What does emerge is a larger sense of a heritage, an identity, even if unknowingly borne by these characters, which cannot be erased by the variant details of each life, nor by being severed from the ancestral land. Having been on the road, can we go home again?

No. We are always home.

Michel Basilières is the author of the novel Black Bird.