“It’s summer in Boucherville, that famous summer between high school and CEGEP when you feel like you’re going to become someone, but you don’t know exactly who yet. This sentence, written on the back cover of the full of ordinaryperfectly sums up Étienne Tremblay’s first novel: the story of Mathieu, a teenager like the others, whose dreams are as grandiose as the skids, loves, as powerful as the troubles.
A night worker at a service station, Mathieu, alone and alienated by a stream of thoughts that he can’t manage to articulate, let alone unravel, is consumed to the rhythm of cigarettes and joints that he strings together. Between activating gas pumps and checking lottery tickets twice, the young man seeks in sunsets and suspended moments the poetry and the distance with the world that will allow him to walk in the footsteps of Boris Vian, to forge his new identity as a man and, above all, to find the courage to seduce the beautiful Val.
With the candor, illusions, confidence and taste for risk of a privileged adolescence, Mathieu is quickly confronted with the reality of his mistakes, his shortcomings and his regrets, undertaking the unpredictable path – and strewn with bad choice — of adult life.
Ordinary chronicle of the joys and miseries of adolescence, Full of ordinary gives soul and body to the boredom-filled reality of a youth hemmed in by the contours of a suburb and by its promises of beyond, somewhere in the late 2000s. In an honest and uncompromising portrait, Étienne Tremblay fully embraces nostalgia for a still carnal era, where parties and illicit pleasures were lived in groups, where distance, lack and desire were imprinted on the flesh and could not be filled by illusion of proximity that social networks dangle.
The raw, embodied and sensual language of the author manifests itself in an eruption of wanderings, fantasies, anger and interrupted ideas which come up against the limits and awareness imposed by adulthood, accelerated here by the monotony of customer service.
“You’re told that you’re disgusting people with your loyalty card business, and five minutes later you’re being called a thief because you forgot to remind Madame that she has one. After dealing with dozens of adults who haven’t had enough triple the years you’ve spent on Earth to learn how to say hello, past 18 hours, you’ve got some kind of decorum trainee who’s pissing you off a latte because you say hello instead of good evening. »
The antihero imagined by Étienne Tremblay, a splendid loser endowed with a sensitivity and a sense of responsibility in construction, could hardly be more endearing, sinking on each page in a predictability that is as infuriating as it is cathartic. An apparently simple novel, which assumes its nostalgic side by extolling hope and the splendor of excess.