Anyone fond of linked narratives will warm to the idea that Québécois writer Marcel Tremblay has written these six Mont-Royal novels to illuminate the characters that regularly figure in his plays.

In long-fiction, readers have a glimpse into their thoughts and feelings. We are not only witnessing dialogues and interactions, but exploring another layer of understanding.

And, to do so, we move swiftly between and among characters, with each perspective occupying a few pages of narrative without interruption. Which is to say that it all comes out in a burst for each: dialogue and details and the inner workings, without paragraphs.

There are some characters we come to know quickly and thoroughly, like three-year-old Marcel—whom readers could view as a stand-in for the author, whose own childhood unfolded in cramped quarters on Mont-Royal, a vibrant working-class neighbourhood, with an extended family and community ties. (I wonder, was there a cat whom Michel adored as much as Marcel adores the neighbourhood Tomcat, Duplessis?)

There are other characters who appear when circumstances invite their inclusion. There are six other neighbourhood women in the first volume, for instance, who are pregnant when Marcel’s aunt is pregnant. She’s given the side-eye for being pregnant so late in life, for not having resisted her husband’s advances, and Marcel’s mother Albertine scolds her openly, resenting her bedrest and the extra chores that have fallen on Albertine’s shoulders. But the other women’s stories are different, yet again.

The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (1978;1981) I’ve read three times. This time, I could place the family members more easily; there are a lot of adult siblings, with a lot of children, all in one apartment—their goings-on are quite satisfying. This time, I was able to enjoy the neighbours more: in particular the ageing prostitute with gossip on politicians and clergy (and her squabbles with the young woman who’s inherited from her mother the role of house-keeper), and the pair of working girls—each of whom manages her liaisons with young soldiers with varying degrees of finesse—in love with one another. And I took more notice of the cutting looks, sharp words, and slurs—as neighbours navigate the world around them, and the judgements cast for participating (or, not) in England’s War.

“It was Saturday afternoon: la rue Mont-Royal was teaming with housewives doing their shopping, whimpering children drooling onto their mothers’ skirts, drunks sitting or, rather, laid out in the tavern doorways. No adolescents. No young men. Or hardly. The few young men cruising la rue Mont-Royal that afternoon did so on the arms of pregnant women, whose presence served as alibi to their country in time of war, as guarantees of their honesty, and most of all, their innocence.”

In Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel (1980;1984), we spend more time with Marcel’s older sister, who is eleven years old. All the kids go to Parc Lafontaine together in the first volume; here, Thérèse is on her way to school with her best friend, and the neighbour girl they’ve known their whole lives, who has been recovering from an operation for her cleft lip. Mother Superior at the school is irate to learn that this has transpired, an operation of great expense, even though the school has traditionally forgiven the family’s school fees; even after it’s revealed that the family physician covered the costs, tensions remain among the nuns—vocations are questioned, judgements passed, fury expelled. Some realisations feel innocuous and others dramatic and, throughout, there is a focus on the kind of personal detail and reflection which reminds us that each is an individual with hopes and fears.

“Sister Saint Catherine caught herself listening to the sound of the motor, when the streetcar stopped for passengers. The two notes, close together and endlessly repeated, reawakened in her whole slices of childhood, clear, vivid memories of nearly every summer afternoon.”

The first volume unfolds on May 2, 1942, and the second on June 1st, in segments named for Brahms Fourth Symphony; the third begins in January 1947, with sayings attributed to Victoria—Marcel’s great-grandmother, another kind of music.

The Duchess and the Commoner (1982;1999) opens with a gloriously winter scene: young Marcel rises early from the cot between his uncle Edouard’s room and Victoria’s, and he admires the snow falling outdoors, but also becomes aware of a shift in energy which heralds Victoria’s exit from the saga. But, not quite—because the narrative shifts back to the previous August. The focus is the Théâtre Nationale, with the housekeeper’s daughter from the first volume figuring prominently: a colourful and interconnected troupe. So, we move from nuns and bishops to actors and stagehands. “The audience laughed a lot from the start, but not always for the right reasons.” Marcel (now 9-ish) remains the reader’s touchpoint, but the theatre is centre-stage. Cousin Richard is now boarding at the Collège Sainte-Marie, but even being home just for weekends, he demonstrates his 16-ish-ness:

“Mama, honestly, you read Balzac and you still say ‘un banane’ and ‘une escalier” to which his mother replied: “I don’t read Balzac to learn how to talk, sweetie, I read Balzac to help me live!”

The fourth volume opens in August 1976, days before the summer Olympics are set to open: the Duchess from the previous volume now gripes about political priorities, in much the same way that supporting “the English war” was divisive in the first. But, by virtue of a travel journal, kept in the summer of 1947, the existing chronology remains intact.

News from Edward (1984; 2000) belongs to Victoria’s youngest son (Marcel’s “bachelor” uncle) who also appeared frequently on-stage in the theatre. His travel journal chronicles his voyage on a ship with a French name La liberté (where everything still happens in English, he notes). Looking at the night sky, he’s struck with an existential crisis: “What’s the use of being a shoe salesman, who dreams of becoming a transvestite, out there in the middle of that emptiness?” He doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere and finds no comfort in Victoria’s advice—“It’s better to be first in your own little village than second in Paris”—but then realises there are shoe salesmen in Paris, too, their stories left untold.

“I’d been moved earlier when I imagined Maigret but I couldn’t manage it in front of the genuine Paris landscape as it was lit up in the night now being born.”

The First Quarter of the Moon (1989;1994) is the fifth volume which picks up ten years after the first. In that summer, seven women in the neighbourhood had been pregnant at once (one of them the “fat woman” of the title, Marcel’s aunt), and one of those other children is the heart of this novel: he is ten years old and Marcel is thirteen. By now, there has been plenty of commentary about Marcel being strange, almost not-of-this-world, from other family and neighbours. This younger boy spends more time with Marcel than anyone: much of it behind an overgrown bleeding-heart bush, where a boy can lie and stare at the June sky for hours. Marcel’s need for solitude, his sense of being more observer than a participant: these things set him apart. His aunt recognises his peculiarity as a strength rather than a weakness; I don’t know why his aunt is never named in the English, for in the original, she’s named Nana—she’s 51 in this book, and more important than ever for young Marcel.

“A book lay next to her chair, the latest novel by Gabrielle Roy which she hadn’t read yet and had brought out just in case …. But no urge to read had struck her during the splendor of this late afternoon. Plunged in the cool shadow of the balcony she had decided she needed only some little nothings that made her feel secure: summer had truly arrived and she intended to spend it out here, watching it unfurl its charms.”

The final volume, A Thing of Beauty (1997;1998) has a heavy load to bear, but Tremblay had twenty years to hone his craft. And, indeed, the story opens twenty years after the first novel, so Marcel is twenty-three. He’s still thrilled to learn it has snowed overnight, but now he’s sharing a tiny apartment (and bed!) with his mother, Albertine. He goes to Parc Lafontaine to marvel at the snowscape, but also to escape his mother. His usual coping mechanisms (studying works of art in the pages of books, imagining movies that order events in a way that suits him, writing stories in his mind like those by Gabrielle Roy which his Aunt Nana loves so much)—well, they have their limitations. There are both surprises and sorrows in this final installment of the story.

“The many layers of daydreams he has deposited over his childhood have conferred a mythic, a marvelous quality on this place, though in fact it’s just a rather cramped apartment, despite the many rooms, that smells of the sticky humidity of the summer that’s on the horizon.”

When Therese suggests that they all move back into the Fabre Street apartment, once inhabited by ten of the family members, it’s too late to debate, because she’s already signed the lease. This thread of continuity is both thrilling and sad, and it echoes the emotions swirling as the cycle draws to a close. In that way, it felt like a resolution with great integrity.

It was an unexpected delight to find myself reading this cycle alongside Proust’s cycle about time and memory, to realise that Tremblay’s work is in constant conversation with it (I can’t believe I missed the Marcel link, on earlier readings), as well as other stories that serve to root so many of us when we are jostled by the blows that fill our day-to-day-off-the-page lives.

Anglo Canadian readers routinely overlook French-Canadian literature, but there’s nothing routine about Tremblay’s work, and I’m so glad to have read these six novels. All the Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal volumes have been translated from French into English by Sheila Fischmann.