With chapter titles referring to a handful of august English literary figures (Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Isherwood prominent among them), Scott’s debut novel has muted hedge sparrow tones compared to Lambert’s radiant peacock. The author interjects musings on capitalism (in chapters titled “Lumpenproletariat,” “Collective Agreement,” “Solidarity” and so on) with provocative set pieces that include but are not limited to misspelled threats, Javexed coffee, infanticide, Molotov cocktails, suicides, a fatal impaling, prodigious amounts of crack cocaine, a baseball game that erupts into violence and ironic authorial interjections (in which “I - Kevin Lambert, author of this modest fantasy -” explains his personal stance on the strike).įebrile, postmodern to the bone and unexpectedly affecting, the novel is a startling, mile-a-minute performance. Roberval, “a dirty little muddle of bungalows and two-storey commercial units that gnaw away at a portion of the Lac Saint-Jean shoreline,” is the drab stage for Lambert’s grisly tragedy.
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