“The distance increases between reality and me, longer and looser, like a late-night yawn. What will happen in two, six months? The stretch will be of no return. We will become distorted Lego pieces; none of us will be able to regain our place in the world. » Dispossessed of everything, Sidonie, heroine of Glass people, is inscribed “in quotation marks”, in a reality that escapes it. While exploring the reality of the homeless, the poverty and misery that we tend to confine, the author Catherine Leroux probes, in powerful language, repartees as lucid as they are ironic, the notions of truth and freedom.
The idea of writing this fifth novel, of reflecting on the privileges, inequalities and fatalities induced by a capitalist society, was born from the personal experience of Catherine Leroux, who had to, due to a radical change in her personal life , relocate. On the other end of the receiver, she recounts how, suddenly, at a moment in her life, her relationship with housing and habitation was destabilized on an emotional and material level. “Because sometimes we are forced to leave a place to which we are attached — where we thought we would live for a very long time — whether because of a separation, a change of job or a eviction [… ] », she confides, while emphasizing the difficulties linked to this material insecurity and rehousing. But beyond this personal concern, she of course evokes the reality of those that her character Sidonie calls the “unhoused”, these homeless people who are multiplying in the cities. “It was also impossible during that whole period [au moment de son propre déménagement] to ignore what was happening on a more global or social level… There were more homeless people. I stay in the north of the city of Montreal, in Ahuntsic, where, before, we hardly saw any homeless people. Now, there are some in all the parks, there are tents set up on the banks of the Rivière des Prairies, I think it’s like that everywhere in town. »
The truth, but what truth?
If the reality of this “floating population” is part of the ecosystem of Glass people, the notions of truth and lies, illusions and reality are intrinsically linked to the characters and their destiny. They were also part of the thoughts behind the novel. “In our lives, when we learn of a scandal, we have a feeling of weightlessness, as if the ground was slipping away from under our feet, we don’t know which way is north. And that’s the effect I wanted to create, that I wanted my characters and my readers to experience. The feeling that the rules of the game are constantly changing […] I wanted to talk about the question of truth in the modern world. About the liquefaction of public discourse, about the fact that we are almost never able to get our hands on an irrefutable fact — especially when we are on the Web — but it was also a reading experience that I wanted to create. »
Confident that she lies as little as possible in her real life, Catherine Leroux admits with a laugh that she also tends to believe what she is told, especially if it is well told. “When you are often fooled, you end up understanding that the truth is not necessarily what you thought. » Which led her to think about conspiracy theories and the psychological side of the truth.
“In our heads, what’s happening is not so much an accumulation of facts, it’s that we’re turning everything into stories. The way we understand our lives is a bit of fiction. The facts, the pure and hard truth as in science, I don’t really know where it is in our lives. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist, but I’m saying that there is a lot more fiction around us than we think. » She also adds that we are real story machines. Like the characters in the novel, each person moves forward and constructs their own truth. A truth that is inseparable from the freedom we grant ourselves.
Invent your freedom
There is in Glass people several degrees of meaning framed by the notion of freedom, the cornerstone of the author’s entire life. There is indeed in the DNA of the character of Sidonie, just as in that of Catherine Leroux, a need to escape the rigidities imposed by society, from control, from senseless laws. A need to decide about our life without being caught in the cogs of a society that decides for us.
“It’s clear that my own concerns about constraint versus freedom in a world where everyone feels extremely stuck in their daily lives haunts the entire novel, and particularly certain characters. Sidonie, for me, is someone who created himself. Is there any greater freedom than saying “I want to be who I want”? She invented herself.”
In a society that prefers to “lock up poverty” in housing reserved for those left behind, the notion of freedom and privileges thus takes on its full meaning. “I think that’s one of the things I wanted to look at in Glass people. The poor do not have the same freedoms as the rich. We know this because they do not have the same economic means. They also do not have the same freedom in the eyes of the State. […] The concept of HAPPI [dans lequel les personnages sont confinés] — workshop dwelling for unhoused people — was inspired by institutions which have really existed throughout history, notably for several centuries in Great Britain, and which were called workhouses. You could theoretically get in and out, but in reality, it was very difficult to get out. If you don’t have material means, you don’t have the right to be a free citizen,” she explains.
Social and philosophical novel, Glass people is thus carried by damaged but strong characters, who manage to transcend poverty, to appropriate a certain freedom and to escape, or so they believe, from the cold and calculated world that is imposed on them.