Homage to Fromage

     From start to finish Heather O'Neill's The Girl Who Was Saturday Night made me raise an eyebrow, shake my head, smile, laugh, gasp and cheer; in the end I even shed a tear. This is the brilliance and mystery of good fiction: when a book is well written, it is true, even if it's not.

     When I was reading it, and even now that I'm done, I just want to tell everyone about it: it's so Canadian, it captures the zeitgeist, it pays hommage to poets, Quebec, and Quebec culture, it shows instead of tells, it should be required reading for every Canadian--you could teach a modern Canadian history class using it as a text book, and a creative writing course as well.
    I am just enough out of the loop that I feel as though I discovered O'Neill. Apparently not. Her first novel (Lullabies for Little Criminals) won Canada Reads in 2007. I haven't read the articles in this nation's major news media about her, nor heard any criticism or praise. I just want to love her without anybody else's voice in my ear.
     Because her voice is so lovely: she tells the story in French, and she writes in English. She perfectly bridges the two solitudes this way. She conjures up the past and makes it relevant. She is the cool that is the French. She makes you understand the scene, and why it is the way it is.
     Though I was raised a Mennonite in southern Ontario, and cut my teeth in German and Plattdeutsch, I had a thing for French (merci Pierre Trudeau). For seven years in Banff I had a Quebecois boyfriend. He came out west with his best friends from his quartier, but remained in the mountains when they went back home. We traveled together, and that kept him happy for a while, but by the early 90s he was homesick. He missed his chums. He missed his language. He missed his culture. Somehow he just couldn't be himself outside of Quebec. He returned just in time for the 1995 referendum. I don't know how he voted.
     The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is all about Oui and Non, about being French in a nation that "crawled out from between the legs of the girls who were sent from Paris to New France to marry the inhabitants."