For Art’s Sake

In her four earlier and fine feminist novels, Heather O’Neill studies her hometown of Montreal and its varied histories. Lullabies for Little Criminals, from 2006, follows Baby, a twelve-year-old first-person narrator who is trying to navigate volatile Boulevard St‑Laurent in the 1980s. Nineteen-year-old Nouschka Tremblay, the protagonist of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, from 2014, watches the second Quebec referendum from the same area. Moving into third-person narration, O’Neill charts two orphaned children’s descent into crime, drugs, and sex in the early twentieth century in The Lonely Hearts Hotel, from 2017. In When We Lost Our Heads, from 2022, she examines two young best friends fighting for their often mislaid kinship. In each of these works, she creates engaged figures who must learn how to succeed in Montreal.

With her latest, The Capital of Dreams, O’Neill leaves the familiar Canadian city behind in order...