While the previous ones had a historical and mysterious character, Jean-Michel Fortier’s fourth book is clear and almost contemporary. Poignant and hilarious, often on the same page, It all comes back to me now is a coming-of-age novel, the first-person account of a most touching initiatory quest, a vibrant hymn to adolescence, to its great joys as well as its worst torments.
Expertly escorted by the songs of Céline Dion, the action takes place in Sainte-Foy in 2003. Colin Bourque, 16 years old, soon to be 17, is convinced that his idol’s music is for him. “Her voice pierces all my armor and reaches a place that does not exist without her, a heart that she invented for me. I know she will never know me, yet it is for me that she sings. […] Normal boys don’t listen to Celine Dion. But when she looks into the camera lens and vibrates her vocal cords until they lift the roof of the theater, Celine invites me to give a damn.
Hating high school, starting with physical education classes, before which he often throws up, Colin fears that CEGEP, which awaits him next year, will be even worse. On Sundays, the teenager works in a “trinket shop” where he spends more time chatting on MSN with his best friend, Eugénie Bujold, than selling “trinkets, Russian dolls, candles, potpourri and flower cushions.” The day Colin comes face to face with Yann Moreau, 18, in his second year of CEGEP, his world turns upside down. “My neurons are like a torrent, my thoughts are drowning and flowing like crazy before they reach me. […] My sky just got bigger.”
Whether it’s his parents, his brother, his manager or his aunt, not to mention the Guillaumes and Catherines of his private school with their toxic power dynamics, the portraits Colin paints are always colorful. Without seeming to, by scrutinizing the world around him, the boy tames illness, aging and mourning, but also social inequalities and the difficulty that often arises from being yourself, from going without being ashamed where your heart takes you.
The young man has vocabulary, words to put to his doubts and fears, his desires and ambitions, to what he dares to admit to himself while burning with the desire to say it loud and clear. “The more time passes, the more the truth obsesses me. However, I perpetuate a great lie that sucks me in slowly, without stopping, like quicksand. One day, I hope more than I sense, something will change, and then I too will change. For the moment, it would take the threat of a nuclear winter to make me talk.”
In substance, one cannot say that the novel is overflowing with originality. For some years now, the stories of coming out against a backdrop of high school abound, especially on the Anglo-Saxon side. What distinguishes Fortier’s story is its narrator, a devilishly endearing ordinary hero. Fallible, sometimes cowardly, Colin is even sometimes fake — the worst of faults, according to him — but above all he is endowed with a sensitivity, a sincerity, a lucidity and a sense of observation which could one day make him an outstanding writer.