by Dimitri Nasrallah, Esplanade Books Editor
New Tab, the debut novel by Montreal writer Guillaume Morissette, comes out today. It’s the twentieth Esplanade Books title, and
it introduces yet another fresh voice to a fiction line that has had a successful
run developing them under founding editor Andrew Steinmetz. The life of a video-game designer is not
something you see too often in fiction, but it rings true for anyone living in
Montreal these days, where companies like Ubisoft employ thousands of young
people. It’s a relatively recent
phenomenon, a lifestyle entirely lost on previous generations of writers, to
whom the option was largely unavailable.
As such, Morissette’s New
Tab brings to life a very contemporary Montreal, one that hasn’t really
settled into place just yet. And that’s
what makes it so exciting. Here we see
the city as the fluently bilingual, game-sector subsidized home to a generation
of post-university youth who spends their twenties frequenting all sorts of illegal
venues, going to house parties, swapping cheap apartments, and cultivating
deeply complex social networking personas that are increasingly divorced from
who they are in real life – whatever that
may constitute these days. Morissette
has a talent for capturing this ephemeral phase of being young, both in its
cultural trends and its underlying psyche of social anxiety.
New Tab ended up being Andrew Steinmetz’s final book as Esplanade’s
fiction editor, as well as the first Esplanade title to see publication during my brief
tenure. As such, I decided to call
up Andrew to discuss my impressions with him, seeing as how I ended up becoming one of New Tab's first readers.
DN: When did you first come across the manuscript?
AS: I don’t remember the time or date. But [Guillaume] submitted and I opened the
file, and right away I was struck by certain things. The title, first of all, which I didn’t catch
right away what it meant: New Tab. The
first sentence of the book had this effortless feel. I thought it was striking and spoke of the
now, sounded very contemporary. It was a
very cool first sentence. Then as I read
the first few pages, I understood this whole idea of how the tab, opening a new
tab or a browser tab, was a great organizing principle for a book like that,
where the main character is immersed in technology and communicating primarily through
Facebook and his computer. I thought it
was fabulous.
DN: Seems like he’s working on quite the high-wire balancing
act in the book, between the pop culture of the technology and the ultimate
gravitas that comes through it. How do
you find he struck that balance? Was it
there the whole time, or was it something you two had to edit toward?
AS: You mean the
balance between the ideas and the book’s culture?
DN: Yes, between the surface of the story and its
depth. Because the surface is definitely
a prominent feature, but to me the depth is what really impresses.
AS: The balance was struck from the beginning. We had a bit of a tug of war over the
character, whether he was too self-indulgent or too self-absorbed. But of course he is, or he’s supposed to
be. The character I liked from the
beginning, because he came across as being this androgynous, sexually
ambivalent male, which I thought was interesting. And of course he’s full of angst and
self-criticism. Guillaume built this
persona up quite well. At some points I
thought maybe it was too much, and that’s where we ended up having our
discussions about the manuscript. But as
a writer, what impressed me about Guillaume was that we always had the
conversation going back and forth, and he always gave very rational reasons for
keeping what he wanted to keep. I always
believe that, in the end, if the writer listens to you but says no, you have to
go with them.
DN: One of the things that intrigues me most about the book
is that, not only does Guillaume try to capture the inner soundtrack of someone
in their mid-20s, but that he actually nails it so often, and that he does so
with such brevity and simplicity. He’s
known these feelings, and he manages to get right to them in a way that’s not
labored, but also quite funny.
AS: Very funny, yeah.
That’s what I was getting at, even in that first sentence. That first sentence tells you so much about
the rest of the book, how it’s going to be.
The way Guillaume meshes the character with the technology, the way he
thinks effortlessly and succinctly.
Another sentence of his that I really loved goes something like, “I hate
using my phone as a phone.” I thought that
was very funny, especially to someone of my generation. Again and again, I think he nails, as you
say, his own generation and how they interact, how they communicate pretty
casually, openly, and informally about so many things.
DN: It’s interesting that you bring up the notion of
generations. It doesn’t address your
generation, and I found while reading it that I felt a bit old to be living
that way too. But, at the same time,
he’s captured something so immediate to his particular age group.
AS: We talked about that point specifically, and I said the
reason I liked his book is that it reads like a fossil record of a time. It’s a great representation of how people
communicate ideas. Coming back to this
whole notion of new tabs as this organizing principle, I found it to be a
perfect title and principle for the structure, but also for the cognitive
mindset of people who relate that way.
New tab: it speaks to this brand of randomness where, as things come up,
they can go to a certain depth and then close down as something else opens
up. It’s the multi-tasking of life’s
issues.
DN: To me, that was really the universal quality of the
book. Even if you weren’t of that
generation or weren’t living in Montreal, you could still walk away
understanding something not only of the character, but also of a particular age
group that we kind of look at from the outside now. We observe them with a sort
of dispassionate marvel. How different
they seem to be in how they go about talking to one another.
AS: He’s the first
author where, for editing, we Skyped. That’s the first time I’ve done
that. We sat there staring at each
other. It was a funny experience, but I
thought it was perfect for editing this book. In the past I’ve done it on the phone or by
email. It worked well that way, but I
felt like an old man sitting there, saying, ‘Okay, here’s my Skype handle’. He was totally comfortable, and I must’ve
looked very awkward (laughs).
DN: And apart from this universal quality of generational
socialization that the novel handles so well, I found that if you’ve lived in
Montreal, it’s got something very particular to say about the city that
contrasts its universality.
AS: Yeah, it’s
something about the apartments, which was one of the main themes for me. It was, how to put it, a reference for me,
living in those Montreal apartments and apartments coming up and looking for
apartments, which is all very reminiscent of that age and university. But to me
it felt unique to Montreal, how people move and move through different
apartments.
DN: That part I felt I could readily compare with. I had lived through that. It seems like a rite of passage in this city
to go through those apartments and to go to those fully bilingual parties. So by the time you were done editing, the
finished novel was pretty close to how it came in?
AS: I think it’s pretty close. I asked Guillaume to add some scenes. I really liked the scenes of the character’s
workplace, making the video games. I
thought that was a lot of fun and interesting to read. We thought about adding more of the writing
class that the character takes. But in the end, it remains almost a side-issue
of the whole book. Guillaume was against
that, and I kinda liked that he didn’t want to turn it in to any level of
parody.
DN: I suppose, at that point, it almost begins hitting too
close to home for him, given that he was doing both the videogame work and the
writing classes.
AS: Yeah.
Guillaume Morissette
will be launching the novel on Thursday, April 24th, at Librairie
Drawn & Quarterly.
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