Une gang de fous

Christophe Bernard’s debut novel starts out simply enough. In a small-town bar, Monti Bouge picks a fight with the new mailman. During a hockey game a dozen years earlier, Monti had stopped a puck with his teeth and gone flying into the net with his opponent. The mailman refereed that game and decided the goal should count. But this is Gaspésie, the place where rural Quebec meets the Maritimes and the locals “lay it on thick,” turning accidents into epics and rumours into legends. The disputed goal sparks a multi-generational feud, as binge-drinking characters spur one another to new heights of excess. The prose follows suit, lurching between dialect and the specialized vocabulary of a thesaurus addict.

When it was first released in French, in 2017, The Hollow Beast drew comparisons to Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. Translating it into English must have been a masochistic endeavour, but Lazer Lederhendler, who already has a...