How I Lost the Plot (It’s a Good Thing, Too)

by Lydia Perović

We like things happening rather than not, we prefer continuity to contingency, purpose to chance, narration to meaninglessness. Alasdair MacIntyre is still right: humans are storytelling animals. That’s how we are as readers of books and as readers of our own lives. We talk of characters, events, arc, movement through time, one thing following another; that is our vernacular. Even in our fairly secular societies, we continue to need to re-enchant the world through the fabrication that is the story and the many shapes it assumes through different media.

You may ask, But isn’t the alternative too unpleasant? The answer depends on how you view literature’s purpose. If it’s there to offer comfort from the harsh world, or appease worries, or offer escape, if it’s used to give the mind a few hours of rest by engaging it in a well-told story, then we play on different teams.

I suspect I’m forever expelled from that particular paradise, of taking pleasure from stories and plot. I can’t pretend to having come even close to understanding what great fiction does, but it’s not that kind of consoling re-enchantment. Any consoling happens secondarily, not by design. Yes, Iris Murdoch, I hear you, “Great art cannot but console what it weeps over.” But this weeping nevertheless remains. Is it over the loss of continuity, the loss of purpose, or the hope in hell that Might won’t always make Right?

Great writing is, I suspect, in the business of a certain kind of truth-telling. It’s a kind of work, perhaps a work of conceptualizing, perhaps a work of play, that the reader and the author undertake together. It does not pretend that everything eliminated for a good story to exist does not actually exist. Rather, great writing is interested in what’s on the cutting room floor. It’s equally interested in those sides of life that are unreachable, invisible, unknowable or empty. It doesn’t run away from the void.

Of the many books that have influenced my thinking around the time I started writing All That Sang – a book trying to settle itself around a void – a few stand out.

There is Siri Hustvedt’s portrait of the artist as a woman, The Blazing World (2014). As an experiment in gendered reception, said artist decides to present her work to the world through men of her choice, the three artists who have agreed to the game. Little else is straightforward: multiple voices argue and speculate about the artist, her work and her reasons, but we never dip into the central character. The woman making art is not heard. An echo of what has been happening with women artists for centuries? Or a line of escape from other people’s narratives, a window of freedom?

Then there’s Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn & Child (2012), which begins as a police procedural set in North London, but then we zoom high up and the storytelling peters out in rivulets. What we follow are side views from the margins, people who may or may not be involved in whatever the central event will turn out to be. The two titular detectives occasionally reappear amid the other voices, but by the time they reunite in the final chapter, we realize we didn’t even grasp much of their relationship, let alone discern what exactly, if anything, is taking place in the centre of the book. Its core is disturbingly empty. What happened? And is it amenable to language?

There’s also Jean-Philippe Toussaint and his novels that explore the interstices of living. Some of his works are like a photographic negative, the usual story-forming elements made invisible and the rest, the useless in-between, brought forth. Which is not to say there are no things happening in sequence or some storifying in his work. What happens, however, is often the result of unknown forces, or absurd to the point of comedy. Comparisons with Jacques Tati’s films that appear in blurbs of his books are very apposite. The thingness of things conspires against the narrator, the finicky technology, missed trains, mystifying traffic rules, capricious ball trajectories in the game of boules, the time sucking device that is television.

And then there are the interstices. Camera is especially instructive: two thirds in, the absurdist, comic mode is replaced by a more somber, more static infinitesimal consciousness of the passing of time. The narrator, alone in a photo booth, ponders the moment when in the course of thinking, “you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.” There are the constant struggles (for food, shelter, bodily integrity, making the plane on time), but sometimes we pause them long enough to wonder, Why is that I’m doing this, again?

There are many other great writers of not-a-story, many daring thinkers of the void and of the cacophony. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is a cubist view of a life and a city. Harold Pinter was a master of the invisible, unutterable core. These things find me now with exciting frequency. The other day somebody on Twitter recommended Joanna Hogg’s film Archipelago, and what do you know, it too is of the family: much is said through the unsaid.  

As for the unconscious influences on what we do, they are legion. On rare occasion they’ll come out into the light of day. The other night I was tidying the picture folders on my computer and come across this old JPG of the plinth on the Gwendolyn MacEwen statue in an Annex parkette that I took years ago. Could the tenor of the last small chapter in All That Sang have come out of this memory? The two share the general idea of the nonlinearity of time in the face of grief and joy.

Probably not. I should be so lucky. Who knows? Nobody, much. But the dancing will go on.

Waking Up in the Writers' Room

by Anita Anand

This is a story about errors, dreams, and other ways of seeing.

I never thought I would get a book published. I am happy, a little bewildered, and very apprehensive about the next step in the process, the attention that this book may or may not get. My book is not perfect; parts of it were written by my sub-conscious, and its beauty and its flaws will be in the eye of the beholder.

Two years ago, I took a correspondence course in creative writing at Humber College. A text was assigned. I don’t remember its title. What I do know is that somehow, I ended up ordering the wrong book. This wrong book was From Where you Dream, by Robert Olen Butler, and it contained strange but ultimately profound and helpful advice. One of the strange things was that it was very specific: “Write in the morning!” it exhorted. Yes, when you are still groggy! Write from where you dream!

The author provided many samples of writing that positively echoed with wonderfully lyrical, evocative, yet unobtrusive metaphors, which he felt certain emerged from the author’s unconscious mind.

His words rang true to me. It doesn’t happen often enough, but I have noticed a few clever, almost sly metaphors in my own writing that I don’t even remember writing. It is as though my keyboard were being operated by two sets of hands, one of which is connected to my unconscious mind. When someone else points out these metaphors first, I don’t know whether to marvel at the surprising wisdom and poetry of my own unconscious thoughts, or be embarrassed by what I might be revealing.

The dreams I remember are embarrassingly obvious, and they are almost always about embarrassing situations: finding myself half-naked at work, or in a public bathroom with no doors on the stalls, or voiceless, or in the wrong room, one reserved for people more worthy than me. In the past this was the white room, but recently I think it has represented the real writers’ room, the one I seem to have stumbled into by mistake.

I have always regretted not writing a letter to Margaret Laurence. She was one of my favourite authors when I was a teenager, and when she died, I was very moved to learn from reading her obituary that, first, we shared a birthday; second, she was very shy and found it impossible to believe that anyone enjoyed her books; and third, when she reviewed other authors’ works, her editor had to tell her to be more critical, more negative. I imagine her blinking in surprise. She told her editor that it was very hard to write a book, and that she couldn’t imagine tearing another author down.

I wished that I had known all this and had written to her that people really did love her books, they weren’t just being kind, but that, on the other hand, I agreed with her attitude of kindness when it came to writing reviews. I know that very few people would agree with us. Reviewers, we are told, are there to separate the wheat from the chaff. That is their job. I can’t agree, can’t understand why anyone would believe there is anything like objective worth in a work of fiction.

One critic’s wheat is another’s chaff.  For one thing, from the reviews I have read recently, everyone seems to be looking for something different. Jonathan Franzen wants “the internal lives of characters, with an emphasis on their emotions.” Sarah Woolf, writing about Véhicule Press’s own short story anthology Salut King Kong, wants innovation; fiction that will take her away from “the thematic stomping grounds of sex and youth” and depart from something she calls “Short Story Style”.

Steven Beattie, writing in Quill & Quire, would never enjoy anything I have written. “As a(n)… editor,” he writes, “I am not terribly interested in identity politics, which I realize is easy for me to say as a white man who has surely benefitted from the status quo ante…” For him, the writer’s focus “should be on story and technique, not the importance of the theme or the potential for improvement in readers.” Such concerns must never be “the foundational reasons” for writing anything besides essays.

So a person like me, who writes about such things as identity issues because they matter to her, even tend to haunt her dreams, should stifle this impulse in writing fiction because this would be writing for the wrong reason. If you have something to say, write an essay.

Personally, the only kind of story I dislike is one that has no point to it at all.  I like learning about life through fiction. That could make me an earnest, humourless sort of person, but a lesson I actually enjoy learning over and over is that everything is potentially absurd, from the Seinfeld moments of everyday existence to the self-doubt that plagues writers in contrast to the certainty of critics and editors. Life’s absurdity is a theme worth exploring. This is what drives me to write: something bugging me, something that I understand well enough to communicate, but which lends itself well to an easily accessible metaphor, like a dream about shyness. So that I don’t have to go and rant about it in an essay.

On Growing Up and Writing

by Andy Sinclair

Writing is hard.

That’s the rote comment exchanged between me and my writing partner, Angie Abdou, whenever we are stuck, or have had enough on-the-page frustrations for the day, or just... don’t feel like doing it. It’s the phrase that we text or email or say to each other that requires no thinking. It’s as easy as hello, goodbye, even WTF.

Like any aphorism, it’s not universally true. Sometimes writing is as easy as sitting down and allowing it. Sometimes it occurs when you just stop trying so much (although this strategy is not foolproof either). Deciding to put down words on a page is a practice that requires being comfortable with the idea of elusiveness. Because trying to safeguard something elusive is excruciating.

And yet, sometimes we get enough down. I’m very happy that my book Breathing Lessons is being published. It feels funny to say, “I have a book coming out,” and I usually feel like a fraud for saying it, and so I often avoid the subject completely. A book seems like something an adult would produce, and therein lies a discovery for each of us, one that we sometimes avoid: I am a grown-up now. Most of us are. But ever since Dimitri Nasrallah emailed me to say that Véhicule Press was offering to publish the manuscript and that he would be my editor at Esplanade Books, I have had to chew on it.

When I handed in the final revision, he asked if I was ready to stand by every word, and I said yes, somewhat solemnly. Does it sound like a marriage ceremony? My sister was pregnant at the time.

“Two new arrivals for the Sinclairs in 2015!” proclaimed my mother happily. It’s a lot of responsibility.

And also just a book.

Breathing Lessons is a very personal novel that describes situations that are hard to write about. I surrendered to any energy that allowed me to write freely and uncensored; afterwards I took out lots of stuff and made lots of things up, but tried to stay true to what I meant (I originally wrote that last bit and tried to keep the elusiveness, but I’ve already touched on how problematic that can be).

Since finishing it, I have bid adieu to the protagonist, Henry Moss. It was not a sad goodbye; I was ready to move on. And writing about Henry was good practice for writing down things that are hard not just to express, but to say. Henry does drugs and has lots of sex and can be jealous in a way that makes him come across as very ugly. But I wrote about those things. And now I’m writing (no new book yet!) about other things that are difficult to share, because they might make me seem disagreeable, and I would rather people find me likeable. Some of these are observations about our governments, worries about new security laws, and questions about why big industries seem to have such disproportionate input into new legislation. These topics have always been written about, and I haven’t made much headway into saying something new yet. But I wouldn’t have even started if I hadn’t had Henry to practice being scared with. So, I am grateful to him.

I’m curious about the power of fiction to make social commentary, and the way it evokes rather than describes truths. I’ve also had more time to read since the book was done, and the more I read, the more I am struck by how much people are thinking. I just finished The News by Alain de Botton and found it to be a helpful guide to selective information acquisition. And Families Are Formed Through Copulation by Jacob Wren, which makes a fitting adjunct and is a soothing balm for surveillance angst. And by the time you read this, I will be excited about something else.
     
Often I find something so nuanced and perfect that it makes me want to not bother with writing anymore, because I can barely follow it (sometimes I can’t), let alone try to expand on it (I have read similar statements by other writers but it deserves to be said again, for we must believe in our own adequacy if nothing else), but mostly I am just inspired. I hope we all are. I’m aware of how everybody has moments when ideas coalesce, when dots connect, or when reality becomes a speck more tangible. These revelations are unique, and some of us try to write about them. Others paint them, or put them into a dance. Many of us simply sit with them, without urgency, and accept them as they come.

But we are the grown-ups now. And I would encourage anyone with something to say, to say it. Or write it.

Even if writing is hard.

Quill & Quire Speaks to Esplanade Editor Dimitri Nasrallah about Revamped Fiction Imprint

Turning the Page at Esplanade

When Esplanade Books relaunches this spring, Véhicule Press’s fiction imprint will be publishing more authors under a wider mandate. For the past year, new Esplanade editor Dimitri Nasrallah and co-publisher Simon Dardick have been working to curate a list that aptly represents the imprint’s revitalized vision.  This new list represents a clean start for Esplanade’s second decade, balancing fearless debuts and internationally lauded authors as it straddles Canada’s two official languages.

We’re honoured to be publishing the first collection of stories by Croatian writer Josip Novakovich since he was named finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and became a Canadian citizen. Heralded by the Kirkus Review as “the best American short-story writer of the decade”, Novakovich arrives at Esplanade with a formidable international reputation already in hand, but no Canadian publication record to match. Novakovich’s first Esplanade title, Ex-Yu, will appear this fall. A second collection is due in 2017.

Novakovich is in the good company of Québécois writer Éric Plamondon. Author of the 1984 Trilogy, which includes the novels Hungary-Hollywood Express, Mayonnaise, and Apple S, this contemporary Québécois classic offers a wildly experimental look back at the twentieth century through the lens of Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller, counter-culture author Richard Brautigan, and Apple mastermind Steve Jobs respectively. The translations are being undertaken by Esplanade editor Dimitri Nasrallah and will be published between 2016 and 2018.

Plamondon was first published by the innovative Quebec house Le Quartanier, with whom we’ve cultivated a productive working relationship that has also resulted in the acquisition of Geneviève Pettersen’s runaway bestseller, The Goddess of Fireflies, which has been all the rage in Quebec since it was first published last spring. Neil Smith, author of Boo! and Bang Crunch, is translating Fireflies for publication in 2016. Both Pettersen’s and Plamondon’s novels represent a new pursuit for Esplanade: giving Quebec’s English writers the opportunity to translate the French-language novels to which they feel a deep kinship.

We’ll be kicking off the new Esplanade list with Toronto author Andy Sinclair’s first novel, Breathing Lessons, a deeply provocative and powerful exploration of what modern life can be like for gay men.  Canada Reads finalist Angie Abdou writes, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that Andy Sinclair is doing something no other Canadian writer has done, possibly something no other Canadian writer has dared to do,” while Giller Prize finalist Marina Endicott writes, “Sinclair’s ferocious and straightforward prose bares a broken, still-open heart searching for something better.”

Sinclair’s debut will be followed by Montreal writer Anita Anand’s first collection of stories, Swing in the House. Anand paints a devastating portrait of Canadian families in their most private moments. She pulls back the curtains to reveal the unspoken complexities within the modern home, from sibling rivalries to fracturing marriages, casual racism to damaged egos.

Our 2015 list rounds out with Sheila Fischman’s translation of Jacques Poulin’s brilliant novella, English Is Not a Magic Language.  Best known to English readers as the author of the classic Volkswagen Blues, which was a finalist for the 2005 edition of Canada Reads, Poulin is enjoying something of a revival lately, having had three of his last English translations published by the esteemed American house, Archipelago Books.

Dimitri Nasrallah
Editor, Esplanade Books

2014: The Year of Reading Women

by Guillaume Morissette, author of New Tab

We’ve been celebrating the publication of Guillaume Morissette’s debut novel, New Tab (Esplanade Books) these past few days.  Earlier this week, two editors discussed the novel’s merits and Maisonneuve magazine published an excerpt.  Next Thursday, Morissette will launch the novel at Montreal’s Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.  As for today, we hear from the author himself. 

I grew up around women. My childhood was, more or less, four things: 1) being routinely outwitted at videogames or board games by my two older sisters, 2) perceiving my dad as some sort of remote, encrypted, self-absorbed, anger-prone satellite orbiting around my mom, my sisters and me, 3) discussing my problems almost never with my dad, and almost always with my mom, whose life advice was kind and well-meaning but rarely effective, and 4) failing at many things and coping with failure through escapist fantasies and burying myself ostrich-like deep within my imagination.

As a result (or maybe the two situations are completely unrelated, but happen to form a convenient narrative, I don’t know), it seems, to me, that now, as an adult, most of my friends in life are women, which I am okay with. I highly recommend being friends with women who are funny, internet savvy and/or emotionally self-aware. I do have “guy friends,” but for whatever reason, it seems proportionally easier for me to make female rather than male friends. This aspect of my life directly influenced, I feel, material in my new book, a novel called New Tab, which features, among other things, strong, neutral, heterosexual friendship between men/women.

Earlier this year, The Guardian, citing a social media trend, called 2014 “the year of reading women,” which I am also okay with. In support of this, I’ve been meaning, since, I think, January, to compose some sort of blog post highlighting female authors whose work I drew inspiration from for New Tab, in the process maybe reflecting, or trying to reflect, on what it means, to me, to read female writers, or hang out with my female friends.

The following isn’t a comprehensive list of everything I’ve read, just a few mentions, from memory, of writers whose work I’ve read, liked reading, and would recommend looking up on Google.

In no particular order:

Clarice Lispector: I read The Hour Of The Star back in 2009, I think, and really liked it. For a while, I imagined Clarice Lispector as some sort of terminator sent from the future to write sharp, commanding novels filled with intensely lucid individual sentences. Over time, and after reading some of her earlier novels, I was eventually able to visualize her as a human person, just a fascinating one.

That book feels, to me, like: Doodling on a restaurant’s paper placemat whose puzzle is the dark maze of everyday life.

Lidia Yuknavitch: I read The Chronology Of Water in 2011 while ridesharing from Montreal to New York, and felt almost annoyed when the driver announced that we were about to arrive in Manhattan, preventing me from finishing this book. Chronology is a memoir that’s frequently beautiful at the sentence level, and reads like a kind of unromanticized conquering of the past.

That book feels, to me, like: A bomb went off but no one noticed.

Anaïs Nin: I bought more or less randomly The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Volume 6) from a used bookstore in the summer of 2012. I had glanced at the opening section, which featured a vivid, creative description of LSD use, and decided to get it, even though it seemed incredibly unlikely, to me, that I would read this book in full, from first page to last. For some reason, I wanted to own it anyway, maybe just to confirm that I wouldn’t finish it. It turned out that I liked reading about Nin’s social life, her descriptions of people, calm lucidity, views on her own work, and that the structure of Nin’s diary, which unfolds in vignettes, was really helpful as an additional reference point for New Tab, which was maybe 40% complete at the time, and also unfolds in fragments of different sizes.

That book feels, to me, like: Tourism in the warzone of the inner self.

Ashley Opheim: Ashley & me both live in Montreal. In maybe late 2010 or early 2011, we exchanged emails for the first time, without having previously met in person. I sent her a short story and she sent me poems that I remember describing to someone else as “very insane” and “kind of awesome.” Since then, she’s become one of my closest friends. She also happens to be, hopefully independent of our friendship, my favorite Canadian poet. Her work seems, to me, privately exciting, and deeply unalike a lot of Canadian poetry. Her poems aren’t academic in nature, or overly sentimental, but rather seem animated by a kind of inner vitality and blissfulness that make them communicative, playful, funny, modern and celebratory.

That book feels, to me, like: What would happen if you were to give Emily Dickinson colored chalk and a yoga mat.

Melissa Broder: I’ve been following Melissa Broder on Twitter and reading some of her poems online since, I think, early 2012. I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of her new collection, Scarecrone, and read it in mostly one sitting, feeling positive and enthusiastic about where she’s trying to take poetry. Her poems are fun, chaotic and entertaining, and some of her lines are powerful and instantly tweetable.

That book feels, to me, like: The abyss taking a selfie with God.

Mary Robison: I first googled Why Did I Ever in late 201o, after reading an interview with Amy Hempel in which she mentioned Mary Robison’s book. It’s a light, quick read that isn’t particularly plot-heavy, but features a seemingly effortless, highly interesting tone/structure. The novel unfolds in 536 short snippets that are often calm, wry, funny and tragic, all at once.

That book feels, to me, like: The exhaustion of trying to make life decisions that aren’t terrible.

Renata Adler: I don’t remember at all how I learned about Speedboat (or it’s pseudo-sequel, Pitch Dark), but after somehow ordering a used copy from Amazon, the book quickly became very useful as a reference point for New Tab. Speedboat is composed of short, seemingly unrelated vignettes about the life of a smart and cultured woman living in an urban center. The book’s approach to plot and timeline can be weird and confusing, but Speedboat offsets this by offering fragments that feel meaningful and borderline complete in themselves.

That book feels, to me, like: My intellectual life is a nightmare.

More authors I wanted to write about, or at least acknowledge: Marie Calloway, Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, Lynne Tillman, Amy Hempel, Jean Rhys, Hitomi Kanehara, Ariana Reines, Lucy K Shaw, Laura Broadbent, Gabby Bess, Mira Gonzalez, Diane Williams, Barbara Browning, Gail Scott, Julie Mannell, Frankie Barnet, Gwendoline Riley, Bette Pesetsky, Luna Miguel, Joy Williams, Jeanette Winterson, Iris Murdoch, Kate Zambreno, Sheila Heti.

Guillaume Morissette's New Tab: A Conversation Between Two Editors

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 24^th, at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.