Reviewed here: After the Red Night, by Christiane Frenette; Fences in Breathing, by Nicole Brossard
Whether or not they are really all miserable in their own way, unhappy families make for good literary matter. Quebec novelist Christiane Frenette's After the Red Night takes up the multigenerational Québécois family drama, in which there are several ways of coping with a family worthy of good literature: depression, adultery, scotch, a nanny, gardening, departure. The greatest of these is running away, but Marie, a small-town 1950s wife and mother, doesn't have that option. She retreats into a gloom even her husband, Romain, the local doctor, can't penetrate. Enter Thomas.
After the Red Night, by Christiane Frenette, translated by Sheila Fischman, Cormorant, 162 pages, $21
After the catalyst of the town fire (which tore through Rimouski in May, 1950), Thomas, always a peculiar young man, escapes into madness. This is neither the time nor place for mental illness, however, and his parents put him in an asylum. His return after a five-year absence is tense: His mind and body broken by shock treatments, he recalls only snippets of his life, never remembering his childhood friendship with Romain. The good doctor takes him under his wing, and Thomas goes to work as the family's gardener, eventually becoming Marie's confidant.
Meanwhile, in 2002, we meet Marie's daughter, Lou, born several years after the fire, into a scorched household. Lou's successful running away landed her in Chicago, where she has been ignoring past and provenance for 30 years. Escape, for Lou, “means not wanting to wait” – for maternal resignation, for housewife-itis, for the gaping familial wound to swallow her. But biology tugs; “any animal in danger dreams of the hole where it was born,” and after her husband suffers an aneurysm, Lou moves them back to Rimouski.
The two generations struggle in parallel: Lou heals her husband and builds a home while assiduously avoiding contact with the figures of her youth, except in her mind, where she becomes “the resident ghost.” In the fifties, Romain is weighed down by his work and his wife. Thomas finishes the garden with Marie's help, planting phlox (“also called Louise, he doesn't know why”). Marie falls further apart, and, as the summer wanes and Thomas's departure looms, she is drawn to him more desperately, seeing and seeking herself in his damaged silence.
After the Red Night unfolds readably, a series of events remembered and observed. The English version is unfortunately distanced by a utilitarian and occasionally wince-inducing translation, but Frenette's original is filmic and memorable, her broad, understated strokes drawing the family's destiny to its inevitable conclusion, an uneasily peaceful one. Lou's escape has worked; she has no children – no future – and, as she discovers, no past, with the family home turned into an inn and the phlox into a parking lot.
Quebec's avant-garde doyenne, Nicole Brossard
Another recent translation of a Québécois novel sidesteps story, heeding – and citing – French poet Joë Bousquet, who claimed, “I don't believe in events enough to write stories.”
Where do you head after a 50-year literary career disbelieving events and stories in favour of reinventing language, midwifing modernism and then sending it to formalist (un)finishing school? In Fences in Breathing, the latest book by Quebec avant-garde doyenne Nicole Brossard, the answer is to plop the writer down in the middle of her own novel and take away her mother tongue.
