Heather O'Neill's Blog
January 11, 2017
The Lonely Hearts Hotel
I am pleased to announce that my new novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel has received STARRED reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and Library Journal!!
To read more:
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/boo...
To read more:
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/boo...
May 12, 2014
National Post Review
Nouschka and Nicolas Tremblay, the twins at the heart of Heather O’Neill’s new novel, are the children of much-loved Québécois folksinger Étienne Tremblay. When they were young, their father trotted them out on talk shows and at concerts, where they’d smile and wave and charm their way into everyone’s hearts night after night; they eventually become famous in their own right, drawing tabloid coverage and double-takes wherever they went. Even as they grew older and began working (in Noushchka’s case) or robbing gas stations (in the case of her brother) people recognized them, and kept referring to them like they were children: Petit Nicolas, Petite Nouschka.
But now, in the early ’90s, things are beginning to shift: Quebec’s cultural landscape is turbulent as the referendum draws closer; their father is a drunk whose act is wearing perilously thin; and the twins (now 19-year-olds) still share the same tiny bedroom in their childhood apartment, and find themselves drifting apart no matter how hard they try to stay together. When Nouschka falls in love with Raphaël, a damaged but magnetic former child prodigy, her relationship with her brother begins to seriously unravel, and soon, her life is changing just as fast as her sense of self.
It’s impossible to talk about The Girl Who Was Saturday Night without talking about Quebec. This novel isn’t technically about the province or its culture, but Quebec is all about this novel — as in, around everything, like air. As Nouschka begins, for the first time in her life, to draw real borders between her own identity and those of the men around her, the approaching referendum glances in and out of the plot not as a metaphor, but the same way the outside world intrudes on any 19-year-old’s perspective — occasionally. It’s a testament to O’Neill’s skill with the first person that the relationship between Nouschka and the province in which she resides is nuanced and complex, but never feels overdrawn or heavy-handed; they’re just a person and a place, progressing concurrently. Two different ways of negotiating separation and its limits.
More important than Quebec, though, is Montreal. It’s hard not to read The Girl Who Was Saturday Night as somehow contiguous with O’Neill’s last (and first) novel, Lullabies For Little Criminals. Taken together, the two books form an incredibly specific historical record of a very particular Montreal — one overflowing with cats and trash and petty crime, whose spine is Boulevard Saint-Laurent and whose primary chroniclers are sharp-eyed, largehearted young women. The two books also share a very particular vocabulary. Both novels are written in English, and many of their characters seem to be francophone, but which language the characters are speaking at any particular moment is not always entirely clear. On its own, or in the hands of another writer, this detail wouldn’t seem particularly significant — after all, the books are English, so the only real “translation” here is invisible, a step that begins and ends with the writer. But there’s more to O’Neill’s style than meets the eye.
The beauty (and frustration) of any translated work is in the way it can make you feel like you’re travelling into a familiar language by way of a new road; images catch the light at new angles, and you get a new way of seeing things while still being held at a kind of arm’s length from the text. The same can be said of a well-crafted metaphor: If it works, you see the world in a new way, but at the same time, you’re necessarily placed at a remove from what’s being described. O’Neill’s writing is dense with metaphor, but it’s not just a technique or a stylistic choice — in many ways, the ambiguous space between what her protagonists see and what they describe is where her story happens.
O’Neill’s unique strength as a prose stylist has always been in the strength of her individual sentences, and in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, the way she wields an image feels less like style than superpower. Instead of using language to approximate or write around a Montreal that already exists, O’Neill uses it to build a whole new one, right on the border between what’s “true” and what it is that Nouschka sees and feels. Lullabies’ narrator, a 12-year-old named Baby, saw the world around her in terms that felt both heartbreakingly naive and tragically worldly; in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, both protagonist and the themes have matured, but Nouschka’s perspective still fluoresces with a wonder that’s so well-constructed and convincing that in the moments when things get a little surreal, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
The cats are a good example. “It was hard to have a memory without at least one cat in it,” says Nouschka, and it’s true — wherever you go in this book, there they are, striding through chapters, apartments, thrift stores, weddings. They tiptoe down the hall “like a naked girl heading to the bathroom after she’s had sex in an unfamiliar apartment,” they stare down at you from the plot like they own the place.
Nouschka’s Montreal is overflowing with detail, there’s always a few more of everything than there should be, but it doesn’t matter — everything always feels realer than real. When a camera crew starts following the twins around, shooting their lives for a documentary on their father’s decline, it seems natural; when a lion strides across the Jacques-Cartier bridge on the news, we feel its approach like weather. Nouschka’s perspective draws the reader’s attention like a magnet, and in the end we’ll follow her — and O’Neill — anywhere she wants us to go.
Emma Healey is the author of the poetry collection Begin With the End in Mind. A former resident of Montreal, she now lives in Toronto.
But now, in the early ’90s, things are beginning to shift: Quebec’s cultural landscape is turbulent as the referendum draws closer; their father is a drunk whose act is wearing perilously thin; and the twins (now 19-year-olds) still share the same tiny bedroom in their childhood apartment, and find themselves drifting apart no matter how hard they try to stay together. When Nouschka falls in love with Raphaël, a damaged but magnetic former child prodigy, her relationship with her brother begins to seriously unravel, and soon, her life is changing just as fast as her sense of self.
It’s impossible to talk about The Girl Who Was Saturday Night without talking about Quebec. This novel isn’t technically about the province or its culture, but Quebec is all about this novel — as in, around everything, like air. As Nouschka begins, for the first time in her life, to draw real borders between her own identity and those of the men around her, the approaching referendum glances in and out of the plot not as a metaphor, but the same way the outside world intrudes on any 19-year-old’s perspective — occasionally. It’s a testament to O’Neill’s skill with the first person that the relationship between Nouschka and the province in which she resides is nuanced and complex, but never feels overdrawn or heavy-handed; they’re just a person and a place, progressing concurrently. Two different ways of negotiating separation and its limits.
More important than Quebec, though, is Montreal. It’s hard not to read The Girl Who Was Saturday Night as somehow contiguous with O’Neill’s last (and first) novel, Lullabies For Little Criminals. Taken together, the two books form an incredibly specific historical record of a very particular Montreal — one overflowing with cats and trash and petty crime, whose spine is Boulevard Saint-Laurent and whose primary chroniclers are sharp-eyed, largehearted young women. The two books also share a very particular vocabulary. Both novels are written in English, and many of their characters seem to be francophone, but which language the characters are speaking at any particular moment is not always entirely clear. On its own, or in the hands of another writer, this detail wouldn’t seem particularly significant — after all, the books are English, so the only real “translation” here is invisible, a step that begins and ends with the writer. But there’s more to O’Neill’s style than meets the eye.
The beauty (and frustration) of any translated work is in the way it can make you feel like you’re travelling into a familiar language by way of a new road; images catch the light at new angles, and you get a new way of seeing things while still being held at a kind of arm’s length from the text. The same can be said of a well-crafted metaphor: If it works, you see the world in a new way, but at the same time, you’re necessarily placed at a remove from what’s being described. O’Neill’s writing is dense with metaphor, but it’s not just a technique or a stylistic choice — in many ways, the ambiguous space between what her protagonists see and what they describe is where her story happens.
O’Neill’s unique strength as a prose stylist has always been in the strength of her individual sentences, and in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, the way she wields an image feels less like style than superpower. Instead of using language to approximate or write around a Montreal that already exists, O’Neill uses it to build a whole new one, right on the border between what’s “true” and what it is that Nouschka sees and feels. Lullabies’ narrator, a 12-year-old named Baby, saw the world around her in terms that felt both heartbreakingly naive and tragically worldly; in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, both protagonist and the themes have matured, but Nouschka’s perspective still fluoresces with a wonder that’s so well-constructed and convincing that in the moments when things get a little surreal, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
The cats are a good example. “It was hard to have a memory without at least one cat in it,” says Nouschka, and it’s true — wherever you go in this book, there they are, striding through chapters, apartments, thrift stores, weddings. They tiptoe down the hall “like a naked girl heading to the bathroom after she’s had sex in an unfamiliar apartment,” they stare down at you from the plot like they own the place.
Nouschka’s Montreal is overflowing with detail, there’s always a few more of everything than there should be, but it doesn’t matter — everything always feels realer than real. When a camera crew starts following the twins around, shooting their lives for a documentary on their father’s decline, it seems natural; when a lion strides across the Jacques-Cartier bridge on the news, we feel its approach like weather. Nouschka’s perspective draws the reader’s attention like a magnet, and in the end we’ll follow her — and O’Neill — anywhere she wants us to go.
Emma Healey is the author of the poetry collection Begin With the End in Mind. A former resident of Montreal, she now lives in Toronto.
Toronto Star Review
Much of it seems familiar. Poor, squalid Montreal. Kids without a viable parent. Sex ’n’ drugs.
Heather O’Neill is writing again about a damsel in psychosexual distress, living near the Intersection of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Cathérine. But The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is a dazzling leap forward for the author, whose debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won Canada Reads in 2007, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award and became an international bestseller.
This time, O’Neill focuses on twins “Little” Nouschka Tremblay and her brother, Nicolas. Soon after their birth to a small-town girl of just 14, they were dumped on their paternal grandparents in Quebec’s largest city. Now it is 1994, their grandmother is long dead and the 19-year-old siblings live in a grotty apartment with their ailing grandfather, Loulou.
The twins’ father, a once-famous folk singer and crown prince of narcissists named Étienne Tremblay, has almost nothing to do with them. He proclaims to Nouschka during a rare tête-à-tête, “Children don’t come first. A person’s raison d’être must always come first.”
When he was still a phenom, Étienne dragged his small son and daughter to his TV appearances and live shows, making them stars in their own right. That, along with the lack of any character-bolstering parental care, has left Nouschka and Nicolas in a state of perpetual childhood, albeit one now buffeted by sexuality, booze and a shared appetite for danger.
Not surprisingly, the twins are unhealthily close to each other, even sleeping in the same bed.
Yet they are very different. Nicolas believes his superiority to others and the absurdity of life justify his life of petty crime. Although a high school dropout like her brother, Nouschka has the self-awareness to realize she’s in danger of self-destructing, so she holds down a job while going to night school.
Her struggle to create herself against Nicolas’s wishes provides the story’s narrative thrust.
With The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, O’Neill has pushed herself further as a writer. Though filled with glittering prose and whimsy like Lullabies, the novel has a bigger sociological context: the characters are Québécois, and the reader is meant to understand that conversations are happening in French. It will be interesting to see how Quebec francophones respond to the book, but to me O’Neill’s evocation of the culture is vibrant, convincing and frequently funny.
She writes of the girls of the past “sent from Paris to New France to marry the inhabitants . . . They were pregnant before they even had a chance to unpack their bags . . . They didn’t want to populate this horrible land that was snow and rocks and skinny wolves. They spoke to their children through gritted teeth. That’s where the Québec accent came from.”
And she explores what the second, 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty means to the characters. In a perhaps too-neat symmetry, it parallels Nouschka’s struggle to break from Nicolas — and all the other men in her life, including the schizophrenic Raphaël, whom she falls for.
But for the twins and their struggling circle in the post-Catholic province, the referendum also spells a plausible redemption. Reflecting on then-Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, who had recently lost a leg because of flesh-eating disease, Nouschka thinks: “He had been spared from death so that he could lead us to having our own country. It had been so long since there had been miracles in Quebec.”
As with Lullabies, the real pleasure of O’Neill’s new novel is the language. She writes like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor. Pigeons atop a restaurant sign are “crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench.”
The prose is riskier in Girl, with more magic and surrealism. When Nouschka’s warmly paternal lover, Misha, smoked a cigar, “he exhaled little girls in pyjamas who ran as fast as they could and crawled behind the couch and under the lampshade, playing hide and seek.”
Nicolas and Nouschka are sometimes frightening in their psychic dissociation, laughing when they contemplate their grandfather’s regular small heart attacks. “We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine,” Nouscha observes. I’ve never read such a brutally accurate description of the death-defying blinkers that come with youth.
Heather O’Neill is writing again about a damsel in psychosexual distress, living near the Intersection of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Cathérine. But The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is a dazzling leap forward for the author, whose debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won Canada Reads in 2007, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award and became an international bestseller.
This time, O’Neill focuses on twins “Little” Nouschka Tremblay and her brother, Nicolas. Soon after their birth to a small-town girl of just 14, they were dumped on their paternal grandparents in Quebec’s largest city. Now it is 1994, their grandmother is long dead and the 19-year-old siblings live in a grotty apartment with their ailing grandfather, Loulou.
The twins’ father, a once-famous folk singer and crown prince of narcissists named Étienne Tremblay, has almost nothing to do with them. He proclaims to Nouschka during a rare tête-à-tête, “Children don’t come first. A person’s raison d’être must always come first.”
When he was still a phenom, Étienne dragged his small son and daughter to his TV appearances and live shows, making them stars in their own right. That, along with the lack of any character-bolstering parental care, has left Nouschka and Nicolas in a state of perpetual childhood, albeit one now buffeted by sexuality, booze and a shared appetite for danger.
Not surprisingly, the twins are unhealthily close to each other, even sleeping in the same bed.
Yet they are very different. Nicolas believes his superiority to others and the absurdity of life justify his life of petty crime. Although a high school dropout like her brother, Nouschka has the self-awareness to realize she’s in danger of self-destructing, so she holds down a job while going to night school.
Her struggle to create herself against Nicolas’s wishes provides the story’s narrative thrust.
With The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, O’Neill has pushed herself further as a writer. Though filled with glittering prose and whimsy like Lullabies, the novel has a bigger sociological context: the characters are Québécois, and the reader is meant to understand that conversations are happening in French. It will be interesting to see how Quebec francophones respond to the book, but to me O’Neill’s evocation of the culture is vibrant, convincing and frequently funny.
She writes of the girls of the past “sent from Paris to New France to marry the inhabitants . . . They were pregnant before they even had a chance to unpack their bags . . . They didn’t want to populate this horrible land that was snow and rocks and skinny wolves. They spoke to their children through gritted teeth. That’s where the Québec accent came from.”
And she explores what the second, 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty means to the characters. In a perhaps too-neat symmetry, it parallels Nouschka’s struggle to break from Nicolas — and all the other men in her life, including the schizophrenic Raphaël, whom she falls for.
But for the twins and their struggling circle in the post-Catholic province, the referendum also spells a plausible redemption. Reflecting on then-Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, who had recently lost a leg because of flesh-eating disease, Nouschka thinks: “He had been spared from death so that he could lead us to having our own country. It had been so long since there had been miracles in Quebec.”
As with Lullabies, the real pleasure of O’Neill’s new novel is the language. She writes like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor. Pigeons atop a restaurant sign are “crammed together like a group of teenagers making trouble on a bench.”
The prose is riskier in Girl, with more magic and surrealism. When Nouschka’s warmly paternal lover, Misha, smoked a cigar, “he exhaled little girls in pyjamas who ran as fast as they could and crawled behind the couch and under the lampshade, playing hide and seek.”
Nicolas and Nouschka are sometimes frightening in their psychic dissociation, laughing when they contemplate their grandfather’s regular small heart attacks. “We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine,” Nouscha observes. I’ve never read such a brutally accurate description of the death-defying blinkers that come with youth.
NOW REVIEW 4 out of 4 stars
Pity those poor child stars. They can almost never sustain their early fame and often can’t develop, emotionally speaking.
So it goes with twins Noushcka aand Nicolas, the spawn of legendary – and reprobate – Québecois folksinger Etienne Tremblay, who thrust them onto the stage when they were small children to advance his own career. Their mother abandoned them after they were born, and Etienne promptly left them in the hands of their loving grandfather.
The twins, now in their early 20s, are a mess. They can’t connect emotionally to anyone except each other – they still sleep in the same bed – and Noushcka in particular has a big fat hole inside her from never having been mothered.
They are, however, still famous. All hell breaks loose when a documentary filmmaker, with Etienne’s blessing, starts a project about the family.
O’Neill, who won the 2007 Canada Reads contest for her debut novel, Lullabies For Little Criminals, has a unique, urgent and edgy voice. Wry on the one hand, sometimes tragic on the other, she dives into the world of sex and drugs with abandon. So do her characters, who are flamboyant, passionate and very vivid, especially the mercurial Nicolas.
And Etienne is a real trip, expertly drawn as an inspiration to the separatist masses – the 1995 referendum figures prominently – who’s hopeless when it comes to one-on-one relationships.
O’Neill has a habit of explaining too much about what’s going on with her characters; just let them do their thing and leave the analysis to us. But that’s a minor cavil. This is a rollicking novel about sad child stars coming of age, with a political twist.
So it goes with twins Noushcka aand Nicolas, the spawn of legendary – and reprobate – Québecois folksinger Etienne Tremblay, who thrust them onto the stage when they were small children to advance his own career. Their mother abandoned them after they were born, and Etienne promptly left them in the hands of their loving grandfather.
The twins, now in their early 20s, are a mess. They can’t connect emotionally to anyone except each other – they still sleep in the same bed – and Noushcka in particular has a big fat hole inside her from never having been mothered.
They are, however, still famous. All hell breaks loose when a documentary filmmaker, with Etienne’s blessing, starts a project about the family.
O’Neill, who won the 2007 Canada Reads contest for her debut novel, Lullabies For Little Criminals, has a unique, urgent and edgy voice. Wry on the one hand, sometimes tragic on the other, she dives into the world of sex and drugs with abandon. So do her characters, who are flamboyant, passionate and very vivid, especially the mercurial Nicolas.
And Etienne is a real trip, expertly drawn as an inspiration to the separatist masses – the 1995 referendum figures prominently – who’s hopeless when it comes to one-on-one relationships.
O’Neill has a habit of explaining too much about what’s going on with her characters; just let them do their thing and leave the analysis to us. But that’s a minor cavil. This is a rollicking novel about sad child stars coming of age, with a political twist.
Montreal Gazette Review
MONTREAL — What’s it like trying to follow a smash hit? A good person to ask would be Heather O’Neill.
The Montreal writer’s 2006 debut novel, the street-life epic Lullabies for Little Criminals, took off like a rocket even by the standards of CBC Canada Reads winners. For a long time after that 2007 John K. Samson-aided coup, it seemed like every other person you saw on the street was carrying a copy — and with its lime green cover, you could spot it from a block away.
In some ways, O’Neill’s life hasn’t changed much from seven years ago. The Mile End apartment the 40-year-old shares with her 19-year-old daughter is the same one she was living in then; she’s still a regular sight walking her dogs around the neighbourhood streets. But sudden ubiquity of the kind Lullabies achieved has got to impinge on one’s subsequent creative process, surely?
“I did have a bit of a case of second-book-itis, yes,” said O’Neill. “You can get terrified of letting everybody down: ‘Am I a one-hit wonder?’ But in the actual writing itself, I go to such a strange, secret place that all that stuff just kind of falls away.”
One happy consequence of notching up a followup, O’Neill has found, is the shaking off of certain assumptions commonly attached to a writer’s first forays into fiction.
“Everyone seemed to think (Lullabies) was a memoir of some sort,” said the McGill graduate, with what looked like a slight roll of the eyes. “So it’s nice to be one step removed from that with a second book. (Enacts imaginary reader-author dialogue) ‘Oh, you make these people up, do you?’ ‘Yes! It takes a long time!’ ”
Set in the run-up to the 1995 referendum, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (HarperCollins, 403 pages, $29.99) follows Noushcka and Nicolas, worryingly intimate 19-year-old twins living with their grandfather in a squalid apartment off St-Laurent Blvd. Their mostly absent father, the now-dissolute former folk star Étienne Tremblay, once made the kids a part of his act on TV, but now that they’re no longer “cute” they’ve been left to their own devices, even as they remain objects of fond popular nostalgia. It’s effectively a narrative within a narrative: two young people fumble with varying success toward some sense of individuality and self-worth within a society trying to decide whether it is ready to strike out on its own. We know how the bigger-scale battle turned out, at least in 1995; we can’t be quite so sure what the twins’ fate will be.
As told in Noushcka’s knowingly overheated voice, the story grabs on the first page and never lets go. The book consolidates the strengths of Lullabies and takes it all to a new level of daring, sophistication and emotional richness. If there were any doubts at all that Heather O’Neill is a major writer with a unique voice, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night lays the question to rest. It is a tour de force.
“I was drawn to the idea of setting something in the ’90s,” she said about her first thoughts of a post-Lullabies novel. “At that time I was the same age Noushcka is in the book, and I wanted to describe how wild and bohemian Montreal was at the fin de siècle. I had been reading a lot of Edwardian writers, like Henry James and G.K. Chesterton (the latter’s The Man Who Was Thursday ended up inspiring the new book’s title), all these novels about fading aristocracy, and I thought, ‘What about doing that, but in Montreal in the 1990s?’ So it would be the fading aristocracy as riff-raff. The anti-aristocracy. They’re a cultural elite, but they’re penniless. A family of geniuses who don’t actually do anything.”
Crucial to the new novel, as with its predecessor, is that O’Neill doesn’t judge or preach. She gives wild bohemia its due: few writers have ever been so good at capturing the thrill of a no-brakes night on the town, the delicious frisson of behaving badly. As readers, we’re forced to acknowledge the glamorous pull of Noushcka and Nicolas’s reckless lifestyle even while seeing clearly that it’s not a sustainable life choice.
“They’re the life of the party,” O’Neill said of the twins. “But they’ve essentially been out all night, every night, for all of their lives, and the party has to end. They’re at the end of their childhoods. They were famous for being youthful and adorable, and now they’re going to have to actually account for themselves and have their own personalities.”
Noushcka is a compelling narrator for reasons that go beyond her language — French thoughts expressed in English with an uncontainable profusion of simile and metaphor. (Soup kitchen denizens “had the complexions of clowns whose cigars had just exploded.”) Capable of moments of self-aware clarity (“I was not going to define myself by the traits that men found adorable in me”), in practically the next breath she is apt to make one woefully bad decision or another. Watching as she plays out that duality is heart-rending.
“That’s the thing about being 19 and 20,” O’Neill said. “It’s such a dangerous age. Even now, my life is shaped based on decisions I made when I was completely out of my mind. I don’t mean mentally ill,” she laughed, “but I was such a crazy romantic, so wrapped up in books and fictional worlds that there was no difference between what was fiction and what was real. And we decide our life paths in that state!”
Deepening the novel’s cast nicely is Adam, a backsliding student from Westmount who forms an unlikely bond with the twins, especially with Nicolas. It’s one of many cases in the book where what might first look like an exercise in easy symbolism — the child of privilege slumming it with the exploited — shrugs off such charges through the sheer vitality of the writing. We believe in the relationship because we believe in its constituents.
“We’ve all met the type. The Selwyn House charmer,” O’Neill said of Adam with a smile. “I liked the idea of taking this kid who’s had the best education and putting him with Noushcka and Nicolas, who are high school dropouts, and showing that they’re all on the same level. Nicolas and Adam have met their intellectual match in each other, and that’s part of their mutual attraction.”
While O’Neill insists The Girl Who Was Saturday Night isn’t a political novel, more than a few readers are likely to disagree, and might well consider its central conceit — an anglophone writing from a francophone’s point of view — to be political by definition. At the very least, it’s an audacious choice, one with amazingly few precedents among English-language writers in Quebec.
“It is (audacious), I suppose,” O’Neill said. “But I think that as a writer you have to take risks. I just decided to do it. I was possessed by the idea and there was no going back.”
What ultimately lifts the book above such concerns is O’Neill’s empathy as a writer. There’s never the faintest whiff of cultural tourism. (It helps, no doubt, that the historical underpinnings are rock-solid: “I must have read 100 books on Quebec history,” O’Neill said of her preparation. “I had a Quebec historian read it over.”) The author’s affection and compassion for her characters is palpable. O’Neill has internalized their world so thoroughly that questions of identity politics and voice appropriation evaporate as you read.
“There’s just so much about Québécois culture that I adore, and I’ve been surrounded by it, so I wanted to incorporate it,” she said. One such passion, clearly, is music. Étienne Tremblay, the infuriating, lovable, serially irresponsible failed patriarch who once expressed his people’s soul in song, is described by his creator as “a pastiche of Jean-Pierre Ferland, Jean Leloup, Robert Charlebois, Gilles Vigneault, all those guys. None of them could be as narcissistic and crazy as Étienne is, but they were all inspirations.”
Another icon whose spirit infuses the new novel even if he’s barely referenced directly is Émile Nelligan, Quebec’s doomed homegrown Rimbaud, who wrote visionary lyrical verse in obscurity, then had a breakdown and was institutionalized at age 20, never to write another line until he died aged 61 in 1941.
“He lived on St. Louis Square, and I would go there a lot as a child with my father,” O’Neill recalled. “I’d be like (wide-eyed): ‘Émile Nelligan was right here!’ The first celebrated Québécois poet went mad, and it’s part of our mythology as a city. In a way, Nicolas has that spirit. He is a poet — he just doesn’t write anything down. He’s standing on a street bench just screaming his poems at people.”
Talk of poetry here is no idle thing: as a high school student O’Neill sold her poems outside métro stations, and she made her literary debut pre-Lullabies in 1998 with the collection two eyes are you sleeping.
“I started out as a poet and that impulse sort of moved into prose,” said O’Neill. “Now I don’t know if I could go back. But I think of my novels as poems. I see each sentence as a kind of haiku. It took me a long time to come up with a voice I felt I could write prose in. You like to give the impression that you just whipped it all off in one furious night of writing, but it’s a slow process. I’m a big thrower-outer.”
O’Neill can probably look forward to explaining her home city to a lot of non-Montrealers in her imminent promotional rounds: hers is a case of a writer who can scarcely be separated from the place that formed her. It’s a symbiotic relationship that works to everyone’s benefit. As only the very best fiction can, O’Neill’s demonstrates the truth that there’s no better way to the universal than through the local.
“It’s where all my thoughts and ideas have come from,” O’Neill said of her preferred setting. “So yes, I probably will be thought of as a Montreal writer. But that’s fine. I don’t see how I can be seen any other way.”
The Montreal writer’s 2006 debut novel, the street-life epic Lullabies for Little Criminals, took off like a rocket even by the standards of CBC Canada Reads winners. For a long time after that 2007 John K. Samson-aided coup, it seemed like every other person you saw on the street was carrying a copy — and with its lime green cover, you could spot it from a block away.
In some ways, O’Neill’s life hasn’t changed much from seven years ago. The Mile End apartment the 40-year-old shares with her 19-year-old daughter is the same one she was living in then; she’s still a regular sight walking her dogs around the neighbourhood streets. But sudden ubiquity of the kind Lullabies achieved has got to impinge on one’s subsequent creative process, surely?
“I did have a bit of a case of second-book-itis, yes,” said O’Neill. “You can get terrified of letting everybody down: ‘Am I a one-hit wonder?’ But in the actual writing itself, I go to such a strange, secret place that all that stuff just kind of falls away.”
One happy consequence of notching up a followup, O’Neill has found, is the shaking off of certain assumptions commonly attached to a writer’s first forays into fiction.
“Everyone seemed to think (Lullabies) was a memoir of some sort,” said the McGill graduate, with what looked like a slight roll of the eyes. “So it’s nice to be one step removed from that with a second book. (Enacts imaginary reader-author dialogue) ‘Oh, you make these people up, do you?’ ‘Yes! It takes a long time!’ ”
Set in the run-up to the 1995 referendum, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (HarperCollins, 403 pages, $29.99) follows Noushcka and Nicolas, worryingly intimate 19-year-old twins living with their grandfather in a squalid apartment off St-Laurent Blvd. Their mostly absent father, the now-dissolute former folk star Étienne Tremblay, once made the kids a part of his act on TV, but now that they’re no longer “cute” they’ve been left to their own devices, even as they remain objects of fond popular nostalgia. It’s effectively a narrative within a narrative: two young people fumble with varying success toward some sense of individuality and self-worth within a society trying to decide whether it is ready to strike out on its own. We know how the bigger-scale battle turned out, at least in 1995; we can’t be quite so sure what the twins’ fate will be.
As told in Noushcka’s knowingly overheated voice, the story grabs on the first page and never lets go. The book consolidates the strengths of Lullabies and takes it all to a new level of daring, sophistication and emotional richness. If there were any doubts at all that Heather O’Neill is a major writer with a unique voice, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night lays the question to rest. It is a tour de force.
“I was drawn to the idea of setting something in the ’90s,” she said about her first thoughts of a post-Lullabies novel. “At that time I was the same age Noushcka is in the book, and I wanted to describe how wild and bohemian Montreal was at the fin de siècle. I had been reading a lot of Edwardian writers, like Henry James and G.K. Chesterton (the latter’s The Man Who Was Thursday ended up inspiring the new book’s title), all these novels about fading aristocracy, and I thought, ‘What about doing that, but in Montreal in the 1990s?’ So it would be the fading aristocracy as riff-raff. The anti-aristocracy. They’re a cultural elite, but they’re penniless. A family of geniuses who don’t actually do anything.”
Crucial to the new novel, as with its predecessor, is that O’Neill doesn’t judge or preach. She gives wild bohemia its due: few writers have ever been so good at capturing the thrill of a no-brakes night on the town, the delicious frisson of behaving badly. As readers, we’re forced to acknowledge the glamorous pull of Noushcka and Nicolas’s reckless lifestyle even while seeing clearly that it’s not a sustainable life choice.
“They’re the life of the party,” O’Neill said of the twins. “But they’ve essentially been out all night, every night, for all of their lives, and the party has to end. They’re at the end of their childhoods. They were famous for being youthful and adorable, and now they’re going to have to actually account for themselves and have their own personalities.”
Noushcka is a compelling narrator for reasons that go beyond her language — French thoughts expressed in English with an uncontainable profusion of simile and metaphor. (Soup kitchen denizens “had the complexions of clowns whose cigars had just exploded.”) Capable of moments of self-aware clarity (“I was not going to define myself by the traits that men found adorable in me”), in practically the next breath she is apt to make one woefully bad decision or another. Watching as she plays out that duality is heart-rending.
“That’s the thing about being 19 and 20,” O’Neill said. “It’s such a dangerous age. Even now, my life is shaped based on decisions I made when I was completely out of my mind. I don’t mean mentally ill,” she laughed, “but I was such a crazy romantic, so wrapped up in books and fictional worlds that there was no difference between what was fiction and what was real. And we decide our life paths in that state!”
Deepening the novel’s cast nicely is Adam, a backsliding student from Westmount who forms an unlikely bond with the twins, especially with Nicolas. It’s one of many cases in the book where what might first look like an exercise in easy symbolism — the child of privilege slumming it with the exploited — shrugs off such charges through the sheer vitality of the writing. We believe in the relationship because we believe in its constituents.
“We’ve all met the type. The Selwyn House charmer,” O’Neill said of Adam with a smile. “I liked the idea of taking this kid who’s had the best education and putting him with Noushcka and Nicolas, who are high school dropouts, and showing that they’re all on the same level. Nicolas and Adam have met their intellectual match in each other, and that’s part of their mutual attraction.”
While O’Neill insists The Girl Who Was Saturday Night isn’t a political novel, more than a few readers are likely to disagree, and might well consider its central conceit — an anglophone writing from a francophone’s point of view — to be political by definition. At the very least, it’s an audacious choice, one with amazingly few precedents among English-language writers in Quebec.
“It is (audacious), I suppose,” O’Neill said. “But I think that as a writer you have to take risks. I just decided to do it. I was possessed by the idea and there was no going back.”
What ultimately lifts the book above such concerns is O’Neill’s empathy as a writer. There’s never the faintest whiff of cultural tourism. (It helps, no doubt, that the historical underpinnings are rock-solid: “I must have read 100 books on Quebec history,” O’Neill said of her preparation. “I had a Quebec historian read it over.”) The author’s affection and compassion for her characters is palpable. O’Neill has internalized their world so thoroughly that questions of identity politics and voice appropriation evaporate as you read.
“There’s just so much about Québécois culture that I adore, and I’ve been surrounded by it, so I wanted to incorporate it,” she said. One such passion, clearly, is music. Étienne Tremblay, the infuriating, lovable, serially irresponsible failed patriarch who once expressed his people’s soul in song, is described by his creator as “a pastiche of Jean-Pierre Ferland, Jean Leloup, Robert Charlebois, Gilles Vigneault, all those guys. None of them could be as narcissistic and crazy as Étienne is, but they were all inspirations.”
Another icon whose spirit infuses the new novel even if he’s barely referenced directly is Émile Nelligan, Quebec’s doomed homegrown Rimbaud, who wrote visionary lyrical verse in obscurity, then had a breakdown and was institutionalized at age 20, never to write another line until he died aged 61 in 1941.
“He lived on St. Louis Square, and I would go there a lot as a child with my father,” O’Neill recalled. “I’d be like (wide-eyed): ‘Émile Nelligan was right here!’ The first celebrated Québécois poet went mad, and it’s part of our mythology as a city. In a way, Nicolas has that spirit. He is a poet — he just doesn’t write anything down. He’s standing on a street bench just screaming his poems at people.”
Talk of poetry here is no idle thing: as a high school student O’Neill sold her poems outside métro stations, and she made her literary debut pre-Lullabies in 1998 with the collection two eyes are you sleeping.
“I started out as a poet and that impulse sort of moved into prose,” said O’Neill. “Now I don’t know if I could go back. But I think of my novels as poems. I see each sentence as a kind of haiku. It took me a long time to come up with a voice I felt I could write prose in. You like to give the impression that you just whipped it all off in one furious night of writing, but it’s a slow process. I’m a big thrower-outer.”
O’Neill can probably look forward to explaining her home city to a lot of non-Montrealers in her imminent promotional rounds: hers is a case of a writer who can scarcely be separated from the place that formed her. It’s a symbiotic relationship that works to everyone’s benefit. As only the very best fiction can, O’Neill’s demonstrates the truth that there’s no better way to the universal than through the local.
“It’s where all my thoughts and ideas have come from,” O’Neill said of her preferred setting. “So yes, I probably will be thought of as a Montreal writer. But that’s fine. I don’t see how I can be seen any other way.”
The Toronto Star Review
The Toronto Star Review :
"With The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, O’Neill has pushed herself further as a writer. […] She writes like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor."
April 24, 2014
Starred Review in Booklist!
Booklist (starred review):
The girl of the title is Nouschka Tremblay; she and her twin brother, Nicholas, are the 19-year-old children of Étienne Tremblay, a once-famous folksinger and composer who, though his career is now in eclipse, is
still celebrated. The twins, high-school dropouts and adrift, are famous, too, their every move reported in the tabloids. Set in Montreal in the 1990s, the story, told by Nouschka, follows her attempts to straighten
out her life even as her brother’s becomes ever more erratic. Raised by their elderly grandfather, the twins live together on the edge of poverty, and Nicholas has resorted to petty thievery to support himself. Meanwhile, Nouschka has become a student in night school, hoping to receive her high-school diploma, go on to college, and become a writer. Her plans are interrupted when she falls in love with Raphael, who
may be schizophrenic. Complications ensue. O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) has written a marvelously intriguing novel of a family in dissolution, each member of which is richly and memorably characterized. A secondary theme involving the Quebec separatist movement evokes the possible separation of the intense bond that has characterized the twins’ lives. The book is beautifully written, particularly rich in simile and metaphor (“The pink clouds in the sky were delicates soaking in the sink”; “The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake”). Compulsively readable, The Girl Who Was Saturday Nightis a delight for any night.
The girl of the title is Nouschka Tremblay; she and her twin brother, Nicholas, are the 19-year-old children of Étienne Tremblay, a once-famous folksinger and composer who, though his career is now in eclipse, is
still celebrated. The twins, high-school dropouts and adrift, are famous, too, their every move reported in the tabloids. Set in Montreal in the 1990s, the story, told by Nouschka, follows her attempts to straighten
out her life even as her brother’s becomes ever more erratic. Raised by their elderly grandfather, the twins live together on the edge of poverty, and Nicholas has resorted to petty thievery to support himself. Meanwhile, Nouschka has become a student in night school, hoping to receive her high-school diploma, go on to college, and become a writer. Her plans are interrupted when she falls in love with Raphael, who
may be schizophrenic. Complications ensue. O’Neill (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) has written a marvelously intriguing novel of a family in dissolution, each member of which is richly and memorably characterized. A secondary theme involving the Quebec separatist movement evokes the possible separation of the intense bond that has characterized the twins’ lives. The book is beautifully written, particularly rich in simile and metaphor (“The pink clouds in the sky were delicates soaking in the sink”; “The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake”). Compulsively readable, The Girl Who Was Saturday Nightis a delight for any night.
April 18, 2014
Kirkus Review
KIRKUS REVIEW
A young Montreal woman tries to escape her minor fame to have a normal life but can’t see past her bizarre family.
Nouschka Tremblay's family ties are stronger than most; when she was young, her father, Étienne, a folk singer, catapulted her and her twin brother, Nicolas, into the small but intense spotlight of Montreal media by using them as props on late-night TV shows to help promote his music and the cause of French-Canadian separatism. At the start of the book, though she is now 19, she and Nicolas still sleep in the same bed and are still embedded in Montreal’s consciousness. When Nicolas dropped out of high school, she followed—no matter how many bad choices she makes about men, no one else is worthy of her devotion—but now she is starting to regret it. When a documentarian starts filming her family to see what has come of the famous Tremblays, Nouschka starts to imagine a life beyond her family, first going back to school for her diploma and then getting married to a man her brother loathes. The story is delightfully bizarre, flush with the free-form vacuity of early adulthood, but what really shines here is O’Neill’s writing. The author (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) stuns with the vivid descriptions and metaphors that are studded throughout the book, such as “[h]e looked at me some days like I was a hostage that no one was paying the ransom for” and “[The swan] held its wings in front of it, like a naked girl with only her socks on, holding her hands over her privates.” As Nouschka begins to see herself as a separate person, O’Neill’s writing grows ever more distinct and direct. This vigorous writing makes the book; the story is surprising and satisfying, but the real star is Nouschka and how she tells it.
A coming-of-age story with a working-class, reality TV twist.
A young Montreal woman tries to escape her minor fame to have a normal life but can’t see past her bizarre family.
Nouschka Tremblay's family ties are stronger than most; when she was young, her father, Étienne, a folk singer, catapulted her and her twin brother, Nicolas, into the small but intense spotlight of Montreal media by using them as props on late-night TV shows to help promote his music and the cause of French-Canadian separatism. At the start of the book, though she is now 19, she and Nicolas still sleep in the same bed and are still embedded in Montreal’s consciousness. When Nicolas dropped out of high school, she followed—no matter how many bad choices she makes about men, no one else is worthy of her devotion—but now she is starting to regret it. When a documentarian starts filming her family to see what has come of the famous Tremblays, Nouschka starts to imagine a life beyond her family, first going back to school for her diploma and then getting married to a man her brother loathes. The story is delightfully bizarre, flush with the free-form vacuity of early adulthood, but what really shines here is O’Neill’s writing. The author (Lullabies for Little Criminals, 2006) stuns with the vivid descriptions and metaphors that are studded throughout the book, such as “[h]e looked at me some days like I was a hostage that no one was paying the ransom for” and “[The swan] held its wings in front of it, like a naked girl with only her socks on, holding her hands over her privates.” As Nouschka begins to see herself as a separate person, O’Neill’s writing grows ever more distinct and direct. This vigorous writing makes the book; the story is surprising and satisfying, but the real star is Nouschka and how she tells it.
A coming-of-age story with a working-class, reality TV twist.
March 25, 2014
This is what I would look like if I were a cat.
This is what I would look like if I were a cat.
