Private jets, vintage liquors, designer clothes and tax evasion. The novelist Kevin Lambert offers himself a foray into the world of the ultra-rich. Those who make and unmake the world. Far, very far, from his existence and his own convictions. But very close to the way he conceives the novel.
With May our joy remain, the 29-year-old writer risks, while continuing his reflection on capitalism, to surprise the readers of his first two novels.
“I don’t want to carry the weight of the other books,” he says in an interview, recalling in the same breath that this third title was already underway when Roberval Quarrel appeared in 2018. The writer also has plenty of projects that are in the process of maturing. “I don’t feel indebted, neither thematically nor formally, for what I’ve done before,” he adds, while hoping that readers will follow him “in the difference”.
A difference, as we will see, which is expressed through a certain continuity.
Céline Wachowski, 70, is an internationally renowned Montreal architect. Adulated, the heroine rubs shoulders with the jet-set, hosts a cult series on Netlix and Joan Didion painted her in the Harper’s Bazaar. But the unveiling of the Complexe Webuy, the first public project that the C/W firm is carrying out in Montreal, caused a scandal, with some accusing the billionaire businesswoman of destroying the social fabric of the Quebec metropolis. She will face the storm in her own way, surrounded by a wealthy friend and her closest collaborator, a gay architect of Haitian origin.
With an anthropologist’s eye, Kevin Lambert composes a novel as fluid as it is disheveled, fittingly echoing the housing crisis raging in Montreal. A novel created in the context of a thesis in creative writing that he recently defended. “It’s the end of ten years of university. And it’s the first time I haven’t been back to school this fall since kindergarten,” he says, with a mixture of relief and freedom.
We will remember that Roberval Quarrel, a particularly subversive “union fiction”, was set in a strike at a sawmill in Lac-Saint-Jean. New worker from Montreal, openly gay, the central character of Quarrelplayed the role of a kind of exterminating angel, an explosive mixture of a protagonist of Genet and the “guest” of the Theorem by Pasolini.
A space of tension
In France, in a language version adapted in part for the French public, the novel appeared under the short title of Quarrel (Le Nouvel Attila, 2019), enjoying impressive critical success before being selected for the Prix Médicis and the Prix Wepler. In 2021, his first novel, You will like it what you killed (published by Héliotrope in 2017), has followed a comparable trajectory in France.
Between the factory and the bedroom, mixing pornography and social criticism, Kevin Lambert laid bare in Roberval Quarrel all the violence of social relations. “The Quebec erotic novel about labor disputes we’ve all been waiting for,” wrote a review of the New York Times on August 13 regarding the English translation.
Kevin Lambert recognizes that the bosses were barely sketched there, described in a caricatural way. This time, he wanted to stage characters that would escape caricature, full of complexity and contradictions – like most of us.
“I thought it was interesting to go back a bit on what I had done and to see if it would be possible and interesting to make a book about people with whom we disagree politically. The thought of the American philosopher Judith Butler, he adds, also played a role in his thinking. He sums it up: any political system that denies the humanity of its adversaries is problematic and bears ethical violence.
“I wanted to explore the complexity of someone who is questioned, without ever questioning his right to exist, his humanity, his complexity or his intentions. I tried to make an object where there is a form of empathy in the criticism”, maintains Kevin Lambert.
“For me, he continues, literature has always been a space of tension. This is what is political in literature. That’s why I wanted to offer a character who is contradictory, who has debatable or annoying positions, with which we can sometimes also agree. So that while reading, one has a kind of freedom of action and thought, a freedom which, in my opinion, is the spark of political reflection. »
A political and committed novel
“This novel comes a lot from the shock of someone who comes from the region and who discovers the city and how it is structured by the powers. We feel and see the inequalities much more when we are in town. We also see more how the urban fabric is the object of political and social struggles that have concrete impacts. In the neighborhood of La Petite-Patrie where he lives, for example, he points out that gentrification is advancing visibly.
Because of its subject, architecture, the novel required significant research, made up of readings and meetings with architects. “Architecture was a gateway to being able to write about a billionaire character, while finding a sort of identifying channel with her. His positions on architecture are not so far from mine, he admits. I am convinced that the organization of space influences our subjectivity. »
In the same way that literature can change us. He himself claims to have been changed by his reading of Proust, and In Search of Lost Time is a bit like the invisible heart of his third novel.
That said, he ensures that the cycle Thirsty by Marie-Claire Blais changed him as much as his reading of Proust. “You feel like you’re immersed in the world when you read that. It’s a bit like taking mush, we have the feeling of understanding everything, of being connected to the trees as much as to the animals or the people we meet in the street. »
May our joy remain is political and committed, of course, but not in the manner of a FRAPRU manifesto. The critical gaze acts as a prism and infuses the whole novel. Even the title, which evokes the mixture of self-satisfaction and conservatism of the propertied classes.
“For me, being involved in literature means being crossed by social reflections. It’s trying to give form, in speech and in characters, to the different political tensions that exist in our society, ”believes the author, who has always hated being told what to do or how to think.
Moreover, in life as in novels, the questions are often more important than the answers. At the heart of an era that sometimes struggles with vagueness and ambiguity, that’s Kevin Lambert’s whole bet.