The Sneer, by Éric Dupont | Montreal as a Forbidden Fruit

Since its monumental The American Bridepublished in 2012, we meet every six years for the release of a novel. Because outside of promoting his books, Éric Dupont is a discreet man who doesn’t really like social networks. “If I had to do it again, I would take a pen name,” he confides. Where we meet, the readers and I, there are no names, only stories.”

But a lot happens in six years. The last time we saw each other was in 2018 for The Lilac Road. Since then, he got married, he became director of Global and Strategic Communications at McGill’s School of Continuing Studies, there was the damn pandemic and he moved near Viger Square, in the heart of downtown Montreal, which was a source of inspiration for his new novel, The sneer. This is one of the nice surprises of the new school year, because we learned about its release at the last minute. Did you know that Viger Square, inaugurated in 1860, was the first gay cruising spot in Canada? That’s what Dupont tells me, and those who sought affinities there were called dudesa diminutive of dandy!

The sneer offers a wonderful and disturbing journey through time in Montreal, from Expo 67 to the 1870s. “At one point during COVID, I said: OK, I have my trip, I don’t see a future anymore,” he says. “If someone had offered me to go to 1878, I would have been tempted. But I didn’t want to drag the reader to a place out of spite. I thought: in what era did the past not even exist anymore and all we thought about was looking forward? Expo 67!”

Summarizing a novel by Éric Dupont is always impossible, it is rather an irresistible reading experience, a clever weaving of stories where there is always a touch of fantasy and a mischievous narration that allows itself humor, so much so that we burst out laughing at the turn of many sentences. Like these dudes at Viger Square or the Jesuits described as the hipsters of the Church…

So I find Dupont in dangerous shape, who plunges us once again into a family saga. A young boy named Aimé, son of an artist woman who quickly abandoned him to devote herself to the search for a fourth primary color (a nod to Global refusal), will be catapulted from Expo 67 to the 1870s in a harsh and filthy Montreal. Where the famous Montreal melon grew, where the religious held huge processions in the streets to fight against potato bugs, and where we come across Mary Gallagher, the famous ghost of Griffintown whose axe murder made headlines at the time. Mary Gallagher was allegedly decapitated in 1879 by her friend Susan Kennedy, a story of jealousy in a love triangle with a man, Michael Flanagan. According to legend, her ghost reappears every seven years in Griffintown. A bit like the rate at which Dupont publishes, if you think about it.

A difficult period

The writer always does a lot of research to fill his stories with fascinating historical anecdotes. And since chance is often mischievous, the seeds of the mythical Montreal melon, which he had been researching for years, were recently discovered, to his great dismay, while trying to understand why we want to find this extinct fruit so much.

“I really wanted to explore the idea of ​​time travel, but it was mostly to satisfy my need to save Mary Gallagher,” explains Éric Dupont, who finds the legend unfair to her, always reduced to her status as a prostitute. “Someone explained to me a few years ago the triangle of toxic relationships, in which there is an executioner, a victim and a savior. I wanted to save Mary from the height of my time. What happened to this poor girl is unbelievable. There were a lot of prostitutes in Montreal because people were starving, really.”

A period of severe economic crisis, countless diseases (the infant mortality rate among French speakers was staggering), an industrial revolution that crushed bodies, and a society that punished single mothers by locking them up in the Miséricorde Hospital, where they were mistreated.

So he finds it very cruel to make Aimé undergo this journey through time. “The wicked irony I found is to take a young man at the dawn of his life, who is looking forward to Expo 67, and send him to 1878. It’s a horrible punishment.”

Make way for men

The writer was inspired by the novel An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim, who was also nominated for the Giller Prize in 2018. “This book immerses us in very profound reflections on the passage of time, and also on the quality of time depending on the social class to which you belong.” In a rare job where she is treated well, Mary will literally have an epiphany when she discovers what is called “free time”. “I repeat, the living conditions were very difficult, but there are people who have a kind of nostalgia for this era, which is similar to that which the French can feel for the Third Republic.”

Despite the women’s title, The sneerwe notice that the male characters are much more important in this novel than in his previous ones, which often celebrate heroines. This is because Éric Dupont’s father, with whom he had a rather distant relationship, died three years ago. “It brought me back to questions that I thought were resolved. His death made me wonder a little about father-son relationships. I wanted to talk a lot about men in this book.” To understand the title, you have to read the novel, that’s intentional. “We didn’t think of the mayor, but since it’s an ode to Montreal, seeing the title, she might decide to read it!”

A book that is “only” 452 pages long this time, but where, as usual, no sentence is boring. “The writer Catherine Lalonde told me that since we will never live off our pens, we might as well enjoy ourselves,” he says with a laugh. My big constraint for this novel was the length. The American Bride was 250,000 words long. The Lilac Road150,000 words. The sneer : 94,000. I’m there and I’m happy.” Why? “Because marketing a huge tome is extremely difficult for a Quebec writer,” he sums up. “The big chunks don’t fit through the machine and the translation is very expensive.”

He seems to have wanted to give a break to his publishing house, Marchand de feuilles, and to his editor, Mélanie Vincelette, to whom he says he will always be faithful, because she always brings him back to what he dreamed of being as a writer when he started out. “A writer of fiction texts whose book titles would remain in people’s memories, but perhaps not the name of the author.”

In bookstores September 16

The sneer

Eric Dupont

Leaf Merchant Editions

452 pages