Lovers and Losers

...A Season in the Life of Emmanuel and The Manuscripts of Pauline Aichange, the 35-year-old Mile Blais earned the praise of the late Edmund Wilson as the supreme interpreter of lower-class life in Quebecits mean poverty and grim deprivation, the grubby humanity of its born victims and losers Until now she employed standard literary French, but her newest effort is written in joual, the French-Canadian street dialect that ardent separatists use for reasons of ideological purity According to her publisher, Mile Blais has written St Lawrence Blues m joual partly because the form of the book demands it, partly as a mocking gesture against the joualonistes who have sneered that "the perfection of this subtle tongue" escapes her The exuberant and raunchy tale is told by a denizen of Montreal's lower depths, Abraham Lemieux, known since his childhood in an orphanage as Ti-Pit, or Little Nobody Penndess and rootless, he drifts from one rotten job to another, and he lives in a slum board-ing—house with a lively bunch of riffraff a promiscuous drag queen, Lesbian prostitutes, a shiftless nymphomaniac Ti-Pit is a shrewdly observant picaro who wanders through a lowhfe maze of episodes in the weeks before Christmas, taking his own crude but accurate measure ot such types as the windbag poet Papillon, a master of empty eloquence, tirelessly spouting the slogans of Quebec separatism although he really cares tor himself alone Papillon's old school friend Papineau is a still richer mark for Mile Blais' satiric contempt, a Marxist ascetic showering everyone with the dandruff ot his hollow political bluster "We militants hate all artists and writers You stand in the way of our march to freedom through violence " Among these petit-bourgeois intellectuals, only the publisher Corneille sees through the phony verbiage and lip-service nationalism "Your provincialism, your joual particularism, is making you narrower and narrower If you eliminate all oppressors, real or imaginary, there won't be anybody left on earth ' Unlike Papillon, the aimless floater Ti-Pit knows the difference between those who are genuinely un-fortunate and those who simply talk about politics and revolution What good are noble words to Bap-tiste, fired from his factory job because he's too old, oi to Baptiste's hippy son, Ti-Guy, dying of drug-poisoning in a filthy city hospital...

...On Christmas Eve, as a blizzard lowers over Montreal, the disordered fragments of Ti-Pit's world come together in a huge, ripely farcical antigovernment demonstration by striking firemen and policemen, Homos Amalgamated, the United Courtesans of Montreal, the League of Unloved and Disillusioned Frenchmen, and 20 different student organizations "In that crowd," Ti-Pit thinks dryly, "there were more demands than people, a hopeless muddle " Papillon and Papineau are in their element, however, spraying their separatist and Marxist gas indiscriminately as the belligerent factions begin to quarrel and pound at each other Suddenly the Breughelesque pandemonium becomes tragic when a troop of non-striking police moves against the mob, bloodying every head in sight and killing a student In the aftermath, the demonstrators unite around their martyr, the squabbling ceases, and "the survivors, without regard for creed or morality, [help] the wounded " No matter that Mane-Claire Blais often lets her satiric jousting run on too long, or that Ti-Guy's death scene slips clumsily from the affecting to the maudlin, or that her arrows are sometimes aimed at targets only a fellow French-Canadian can appreciate She is a writer ot such boldness, vitality and wit that these lapses are trivial Every one of her characters, even the most pathetic and pretentious, has an electrifying life, the full resonance of authenticity Finally, though joual, like any dialect, is hell to translate, Ralph Man-heim has rendered the original text into an English that is superb precisely because it never calls attention to itself...

...Writers &Writing LOVERS AND LOSERS BY PEARL K BELL John Irving is a young, eccentrically talented novelist with a singular rage to instruct His books—funny, cleverly written, sometimes oddly endearings—provide a wealth of information about subjects one hardly expects to encounter in works of fiction In his new novel, The 158-Pound Marriage (Random House, 245 pp , $5 95), the title and many of the episodes derive from wrestling, a sport that, as far as I know, has been unnoticed by contemporary authors From Irving's previous book, The Water-Method Man, one learned a great deal about a rare ailment of the male urinary tract, and that particular pam in the human condition has also been neglected by novelists m droves In each case, of course, Irving's pedantic exposition is eventually linked to a subject that does indeed interest novelists—marriage, with all its devious sexual and emotional permutations—but one must wade through a lot of words about wrestling and urology before coming in sight of the human heart behind these awkward symbols Set m a New England college town, The 158-Pound Marriage is actually about two marriages whose principals exchange partners several nights a week One husband, Severin Winter is both a professor of German and the college wrestling coach "He not only looked like a wrestler, but wrestling was a constant metaphor to him His gestures were those of a trained wild man crude and chivalrous' Born during the War to a flamboyantly sensual Austrian actress, Sevenn was brought up in Vienna by an unlikely group of nannies that included two Yugoslav partisans who taught him to wrestle and sent him to college in America The second husband, the unnamed narrator, is a Harvard man who teaches history and writes negligible historical novels For him, Severin, despite the Austrian's acquired American casualness, is the essence of European seriousness about sex, wrestling, food, the German language Like Severin, the narrator's wife, Utch, is an Austrian survivor of the War, abandoned by her peasant mother, she was adopted and raised by a Russian officer in the Soviet zone of Vienna To complete the overly neat European-American equation, Edith Winter is a thin, neurasthenic, elegant wasp from New York who writes and doesn't cook Moving with self-conscious ease between past and present, Irving traces the progress ot their seemingly harmless spouse-swapping scheme At first, the arrangement appears to be a perfectly reasonable, justified change of pace to rekindle sexual desire, a subtly civilized means of personal enrichment, of savoring other bodies, other bedrooms, other lives (Most of the time the participants' small children are scarcely more than shadowy inconveniences kept out of the way by innocent baby-sitters ) Yet the plan falls apart, assaulted by jealousy, resentment and a strangely old-fashioned, even atavistic hunger for monogamous stability Like wresthng, marriage takes on the lineaments of metaphor, becoming a vehicle for living's concern with the differences between Europeans and Americans He is, in fact, highly romantic about his Europeans, who are consistently stronger, more earthy and solid, more attuned to life's mainstream, than his wan, attenuated, ovenntellectual, naive Americans As the narrator remarks, "My reaction—to insomnia and to lite in geneialis to give in My best-trained senses are passive, my favorite word is yield But Severin Winter would not yield to anything" He and Utch embody the gravity ot history, suffering has lett them with an enduring strength no flaccid U S national can hope to match Americans, as Severin notes in another context, can only "stumble toward profundity " From the wrestling mat to the twin double-beds, Irving attempts to assemble his thoughts on sex and marriage, on European experience and American innocence But although he can graphically convey the special ambiance ot a college gymnasium, his characters elude him, tor all their sexual energy, they remain bloodless, ghostly lovers without bone and muscle If, in the end, Irving seems to spell out his lesson by having Severin and Edith emerge renewed, while Utch leaves her passive husband to reclaim her European roots along the way he has lost control of the affirmations his story is presumably meant to offer Swathed in a tangle of irresolute hints and guesses, neither the wrestling nor the sex bestows sufficient substance or meaning to The 158-Pound Marriage, and one is lett with a mood ot shambling inconsequence This crucial sense of importance—the power of a novelist to command our total attention to his particular range of experience—is brilliantly sustained by the French-Canadian author Mane-Claire Blais in St Lawrence Blues (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 229 pp , $7 95) For her earlier novels...