From Manners to Manhood

The literary map of Montreal includes a few neighbourhoods in which every street, every block, almost every house has been filtered through a prism of writerly attention: the Plateau Mont-Royal, Mile End and Outremont, to begin with. It also contains large expanses that remain nearly entirely blank in both official languages. The lawn-filled suburbs of the West Island, Laval and the South Shore were developed mainly after World War Two, and although many writers and artists grew up there, the vast majority have left in favour of hipper pastures. I can think of only a few good English-language novels about these areas: Joel Yanofsky’s Jacob’s Ladder and Linda Leith’s The Tragedy Queen come immediately to mind. Both appeared in the 1990s from literary presses.

For a West Island resident like myself, there is something chastening in the idea that when one of Canada’s largest trade publishers finally brings out a novel based in a...