Heather O'Neill (1) (1974–)

I am finishing this book at the end of a cycle of six recent books by and about women including The Foundling, by Ann Leary, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue, I’m Glad I My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy, and She Holds Up the Stars by Sandra Laronde (for young adults).

The theme of women in evolution or revolution is consistent with all of these books. Closest to O’Neill’s satirical and scatological novel is Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry, although both are deadly serious in these post-ME TOO books.

O’Neill is one of our funnier Canadian writers. She comes from the same rich vein of Quebec humour that animates Mordecai Richler, Roch Carrier, and the social commentary of Gabriel Roy, and Mavis Gallant.

I come from Toronto not Montreal and only dream of a writer who can do for the streets of Toronto what Heather O’Neill does for the streets and history of Montreal.

She creates a counterpoint of revolution between the French Revolution beginning in 1789 and another imagined revolution in Montreal in the mid nineteenth century roughly contemporary with the social revolutions of Europe including the Revolutions of 1848 that rocked Paris, the German states, Ireland, Hungary, Denmark, Moldavia, Poland, and others.

It is sometimes called The Springtime of Peoples.

This book might be dubbed “The Springtime of Righteous Pornography.”

Her characters carry the names of French revolutionaries including Jean-Paul Marat, Robespierre, thrown in with other characters in popular imagination including Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade. Then she adds what appears to be one of her literary heroines, an ugly but prolific cross dressing George Sand.

We watch the evolutions of an artist and a capitalist. We also see women rise from their chains. From the control of rapists in the mold of film producer Harvey Weinstein. And we see women rise from the chains of gender, the suffocation of conventions placed on their sexuality, the writings of history where women have been written out.

Of course, this story is something of a Western-centric liberation fractured fairytale. We know that women in other cultures are far from liberation. Likewise people of other genders.

In an interview O’Neill herself tells us she intentionally satirized the “lean in” feminism of Sheryl Sanberg through Marie Antoine who becomes something of a she-devil after the death of her father and rape by her suitor.

Her lover and childhood friend Sadie takes to the pen to liberate herself from Victorian social mores.

The dénouement the story is something of a Wildean escapade with missing family members, revenge, and shocking revelations.

O’Neill took her time mashing genres.… (meer)

It’s difficult to avoid being charmed by O’Neil’s satire of life among the natives of inner Montreal. Her heroine, Noushka Trembley, navigates the treacherous shores of nationalist snobbery and masculine megalomania to emerge somehow a little stronger and, amazingly, somewhat sober.

In this novel, Quebec is really a distinct society with its celebrity obsession, Catholic priests who covet story-telling children, and biker capitalists.

Or maybe not so distinct. All Canada is a little bit obscene.

The scene is the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty, and background is Canada’s refusal to accept Quebec as a distinct society and left it out of Canada’s Constitution. It is still, in my opinion, a national disgrace not for Quebec but for Canada.

Nicolas and Noushka, twins born and then almost immediately abandoned in a kind of virgin birth tumble in the manger. English and French. Male and Female. Beauty and Beastliness. Right and Wrong.

There is love story built in between Mary Magdalene who becomes the Virgin Mary in a cockeyed telling of the story where Jesus saves his tormentors the trouble by doing himself in.

Where O’Neil’s structure struggles a little in a rambling narrative she recovers in astonishingly beautiful prose and soaring imagination, comparable with Henry Fielding or Lawrence Sterne or some of the great Russian satirists. (And nobody accused Sterne of a rambling narrative?)

What Mordecai Richler did for Montreal Jews, she does for its Catholics.… (meer)