Rachel Cusk's War on Ireland
Discussed: Outline by Rachel Cusk, The Future by Catherine Leroux, Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas
Big news this week. We pooled our money ($7) and bought our very first ad for Papercut in The Ambler. (We still haven’t paid up.) Rumour has it that Elly (the editor) got an actual papercut handling the issue.
Now that’s synergy!
(We didn’t get our own copy before they sold out, but here’s a lo-fi screenshot for you)
Anyways, thanks for subscribing — and if you like this newsletter, please pass it along to a friend, enemy, or powerful media elite.
- Andrew and Ryan
Rachel Cusk, Outline
Guest review by Montreal artist and musician Allison Higgins.
Hope you had a good Saint Patrick’s Day, Rach.
Catherine Leroux, The Future (tr. Susan Ouriou)
By Ryan David Allen
What if the city of Detroit defeated the British and remained under French rule all these centuries? What would it be like today? The answer: The same near-deserted city that Danny Brown rapped about in "Fields." "And where I lived / It was house, field, field, / Field, Field, house." Except everyone's French.
The linguistic shift has been enough for many reviewers to call The Future a work of dystopian fiction. That's funny. For one to say so implies that they think Francization is a travesty that outranks the decades of population decline, corruption, unsafe tap water, and aggressive deindustrialization, the effects of which are as present in the book as they are in real-life Detroit. ("But isn't it?" some anglophones are saying.)
Much of what distinguishes the Detroit-French dialect concocted by Leroux is lost in translation. What isn't lost is Leroux's fondness for the natural world. In French Detroit, it's everywhere—dandelions sprout from the pavement cracks. Resilience: people are rebuilding; nature is healing, et cetera. The problem is that she won't let nature shut up (the dandelions-through-the-cracks reappear about 100 pages later). Though this is a book where the French have ass-kicked the British, one colonial power's as good as another, and certain passages recall those nature-writing columns favoured by the British Prime Minister in Evelyn Waugh's underappreciated 1938 satire Scoop:
'He's supposed to have a particularly high-class style: 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole'. . . would that be it?'
Yes,' said the Managing Editor. 'That must be good style. At least it doesn't sound like anything else to me.'
Plant life "whispers," the sun "whispers," Detroit "whispers." Every single thing on earth is whispering about 500 percent too much. And the sky? The sky "threatens," the sky "snaps its fingers," the sky "chokes on the sins of the earth." Even rocks cry. It's Mother Nature, played by an actor with crazy eyebrows. And, of course, the wind is always up to something. Then there are people—easy to forget, I know—who dress "like a dead tree," who shed their being "like a dead branch." Did a leaf write this book?
I would have preferred a novel that was a straight-up alternative history of a French-speaking Detroit rather than a present-tense novel set in French-speaking Detroit about hippies and children, the two worst categories of people. For a book wherein houses, weeds, the moon, and strewn papers are personified to no end, it's the historical asides that feel the most alive.
Kudos to her for not mentioning sunsets once, though. That level of restraint is enough to warrant a Canada Reads win.
James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild
By Andrew Sampson
Discovering the hidden gay agenda lurking underneath the entire history of western art and civilization will ruin your life if you let it. Imagine you’ve just bought a used Honda Civic, and then suddenly, everywhere you turn, there’s another one. All your life, this stupid vehicle was omnipresent, but to you it was invisible. Only it’s much worse when you start to see queer subtext everywhere, because stumbling on a Civic in a Sobeys parking lot doesn’t usually make a person uncontrollably horny, but having the sudden epiphany that Harry and Malfoy were doing more than just comparing the size of their wands in the Room of Requirement, or that Larry is Real, is just the kind of revelation that might lead to you @ replying to a minor celebrity and asking them to run you over with a truck.
Such is the terrain covered by Idlewild, the debut novel by James Frankie Thomas, which follows the lives of Fay and Nell, two adults looking back at their intense teenage years, when the two of them had the kind of friendship where it was easier to speak in the plural “We” than to communicate as individuals. They differ, however, in one crucial way: Nell is gay, and in love with Fay, while Fay is simply obsessed with gay men. She sees the queer subtext in everything. Studying Hamlet in class, for instance, she makes the case that, “Iago is gay in the way that all the best fictional murderers are gay … like a pearl-handled pistol tucked in one’s suit pocket, like delicate fingers that could play a Chopin prelude or crush a throat with equal grace.” Together, the duo form the entirety of their Quaker high school’s Invert Society, a mutually-exclusive club that serves mostly as an excuse to discuss Fay’s favourite films like Rope, Swoon, and Velvet Goldmine.
Set in simpler, pre-Facebook times, although — trigger warning for the use of 9/11 as a plot device! — Idlewild provides one possible answer to a question I’ve long had but never quite posed: Why are so many young women obsessed with stories about gay men? Consider the ones who lost their minds watching the May-December romance between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name, or the intense fandom that ships the torrid PG-rated love affair between the Twink and his Bisexual Rugby Boyfriend on Heartstopper. What’s the appeal here? Is it simply that they’re seeking the unattainable – and who after all, is more unattainable than a homosexual – is it that they want to join in? - as many straight men suggest is the reason for their love of girl-on-girl action? – or is it something different, less easily classifiable? Idlewild’s answer, you won’t be surprised, is somewhere closer to option C.
What Fay is going through will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to face the twin flames of desire and jealousy, forced to decide whether they want to be the guys they’re lusting after or just be with them. As Fay discovers, it’s both. Fay is obsessed with gay men because he is one. But he doesn’t only want to be a gay man, he wants to be with one too. And as the book builds to this realization, Thomas sticks the landing, ending with an all-caps epiphany that had me cackling in recognition – “I WANT TO BE A FAGGOT I WANT TO BE A FAGGOT I WANT TO BE A FAGGOT I WANT TO BE A FAGGOT.”