With GreedyMyriam Vincent remains the master of intelligent accrolivres, of page turners who sacrifice nothing of their captivating rhythm to the density of their reflection, and vice versa. Meeting with the one who, unlike her narrator, loves her work.
Catching mononucleosis or salmonella. Winning the lottery. Being spotted on the street by a casting agent. Eve no longer knows which scenario, catastrophe or Cinderella, to project herself into so that her work days do not systematically turn into gout torture.
“There is something cathartic in the initial decision that my characters make,” observes Myriam Vincent, who, in Greedy, accompanies a young woman in this act of rupture: to give up her job as a translator in order to go in search of a treasure buried in the Rideau Trail. A work of art hidden by a very rich collector whose value could allow her to no longer live this existence where, every morning from 8:45 a.m., her time ceases to belong to her.
But as in his other two novels, it will not be enough for his characters to suddenly reject their previous and alienating life in order to find serenity. In Fury (2020), a young woman avenged the sexual assaults suffered by a friend through violence, while in At home (2022), another young woman, fearing being suffocated by the constraints of the traditional couple, will almost be swallowed up by the walls of her residence.
PHOTO FRANÇOIS ROY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Myriam Vincent
“My characters take steps to emancipate themselves, but they remain within the logic of the system from which they want to escape,” the author emphasizes. It’s the same for Eve in Greedywhich wants to free itself from wild capitalism, but which at the same time engages in an adventure of wild capitalism, of fierce competition.
Myriam Vincent was inspired here by a true story, that of the treasure of Forrest Fenn, the name of an art dealer who, in 2010, hid a haul of more than a million dollars in the Rockies, by giving clues to locate it between the pages of a book, The Thrill of The Chase. Treasure that will finally be located in 2020, after four people died while following its trail.
We can project ourselves through a scenario like Eve’s, because when we are caught up in our daily lives, it is almost easier to imagine ourselves making a radical gesture, letting go of everything, than to imagine ourselves making small changes.
Myriam Vincent, author
“There are forces present in our society,” thinks Myriam Vicent, “pressures that have been there for centuries, which are not so easy to brush aside.”
The meaning of the hook
With GreedyMyriam Vincent adds a new stone to one of the most singular works of Quebec literature of the last ten years. Singular by her skill in borrowing her main tools from genre literature (suspense, fantasy, even horror), in order to construct books that embed issues of undeniable complexity in a story that is always breathtaking.
“I don’t plan it,” says Myriam Vincent, as if she had to apologize for leaving us hanging on the edge of a cliff at the end of each chapter. Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and all the fantasy sagas she avidly (!) read as a teenager taught her the importance of “always propelling the reader towards the next episode.”
“I’ve already been criticized for overusing punches,” she says, “but I can’t help it: every time I find a beautiful phrase that hits to end a scene, my brain does like that.” Myriam Vincent mines with her fingers a firework of which her head would be the launch pad.
Money makes happiness
“I’ve always been afraid of ending up in a job I don’t like,” says the woman who happily works as an editor at Poètes de brousse and Monsieur Ed. A fear specific to her generation, thinks the woman who grew up in Contrecœur and will soon be 30.
I come from a background where, for my parents’ generation, having a well-paid job, a pension, a bit of luxury like a swimming pool, was already a lot compared to the precariousness their parents had known.
Myriam Vincent, author
For Myriam Vincent’s contemporaries, university studies came with the promise of total fulfillment, which, in reality, does not necessarily materialize, when the wear and tear of time and the pressure to always offer more to the more or less cursed machine finally take their toll.
Nothing is simple when it comes to our relationship with work, money and self-fulfillment. Or at least: everything is always more complicated than in testimonial books like the one that Eve will write upon her return from the Rideau Trail and which will take her to the most prestigious TV sets, where she will unpack versions of what she has experienced that are not always in perfect harmony with the truth. The hilarious transcription of her interview with host Jean-Philippe Wauthier is also one of the great laughs in this novel.
Nothing is simple, except perhaps when you have the money to remix your life. “It’s not true that money doesn’t buy happiness,” says Myriam Vincent. “Up to $70,000 a year, yes, money does buy happiness, because it’s money that allows you to have access to housing, leisure, and better quality food. It’s money that allows you to change your life if one morning you wake up and realize that your job is making you unhappy.”
Greedy
Bush poets
428 pages