Monday 25 September 2017

I Am a Truck


“Ben, je drive mon truck.”
Not long after they were married, French Canadians Agathe and Réjean moved to the mostly English-speaking village of Pinto – in rural Acadian country – and everything from their remote cabin in the woods to their refusal to speak anything but French bonded them as two against the rest of the world (“Il n'y a que nous.”). In the week before their twentieth anniversary, therefore, it's inconceivable to Agathe that when Réjean's beloved Silverado is found abandoned at the side of the road, he could be a “Voluntary Missing Adult” as the police insist. Switching between the aftermath of “Now” (in which Agathe is forced to get a job in town and mingle with Anglos, even as she insists that Réjean will eventually come home) and the recent past of “Then” (in which small secrets that both Agathe and Réjean guard grow into an unseen gap between them), I Am a Truck sketches a tragicomic narrative, with the two time streams converging on a present that explores the ideas of identity, love, and allegiance. This book is weirdly funny (not quite laugh out loud, but like a Coen Brothers movie), totally charming, unequivocally Canadian, and asks the all important question: Will the world ever see peace between those who drive Chevys and those who favour Fords? (Also: Why would anyone even be thinking about buying a Renault?)

The beginnings of a love story, which I am including at length to capture something of the tone of this book:
Agathe had been watching the eaves for birds while her mother examined potatoes. When Réjean suddenly appeared, his eyes already on her, he saturated her field of vision. Agathe's knees buckled and she slid to the ground. Édithe Thibeault was quick and sharp, tossing the bag of potatoes into the air and catching her daughter before she hit the ground. As the potatoes rained down, Édithe looked up and also set disbelieving eyes on Réjean. At only fifteen, he was close to seven feet tall, with a chest as big as a rain barrel and arms the size of a normal man's legs. His hands were like a bunch of bananas. He was already working on the downy beginnings of his moustache. For her part, Agathe had just the year before peeled her way out of a rind of unremarkability, emerging that summer a very pretty girl. Her mother's friends would comment that Agathe was now pretty enough to be a newscaster or a figure skater and that perhaps, her beauty would be the thing to finally put P'tit Village on the map. For Réjean, she became existence itself. He broke from his brothers and swept in, hands extended, and, without a word, pulled up both Agathe and her mother so that their feet briefly left the ground. His eyes locked on Agathe's until he turned to join his brothers, gazing over his shoulder at her. When she had finally lost sight of his back in the crowd, Agathe began to cry.

On returning from the market, Réjean asked his mother for a haircut and presented himself at the Thibeault's door later that same afternoon, hair clippings still in his ears, asking if Agathe would like to go for a walk. He couldn't have expected that once they reached the woods at the end of the street, Agathe would grab him and pull him to her, knocking the breath out of them both. They had to wait three years to get married.
Twenty years later, Réjean goes to work in the woods every day while Agathe stays home to make date squares and rappie pie, they spend their evenings playing gin rummy, and look forward to acting out inventive role-playing scenarios in bed at night. Why would Réjean walk away from all that? And how could Réjean simply walk away from his Silverado; a new model of which he buys every year? The secrets they keep: Despite loving their time driving together in Réjean's pickup, Agathe has grown tired of the French folk songs her husband insists on listening to on the truck's radio; Agathe wouldn't mind turning to the English rock and roll station every now and then. As for Réjean, when he confides to an acquaintance that he feels something is missing in his life, and this friend recommends that Réjean find a hobby, the big man begins to fantasise about hurting men whom he imagines forcing themselves on his wife (strange hobby, n'est-ce pas?). Wherein these two secrets intersect lies both the tragedy and the comedy.
“C'est ne pas un crime, Martin,” he laughed, “driver un Ford.”
So much in this book is about identity: Chevy drivers vs Ford drivers (and what do you make of a Chevy salesman who drives a Ford?) seems an ironic substitute for the all-too-Canadian dichotomy of Anglos vs Frocophones (and what do you make of the English-speaking man who secretly learns French to better communicate with a man he admires? What of the French-speaking woman who tries out, sotto voce, the English phrases of the brash blonde who whirlwinds into her life?). I liked that in the town of Pinto, there are whole conversations with one person speaking English, the other responding in French, and the two of them understanding each other perfectly (and I also appreciated that the French is untranslated, but not beyond what I learned in school). I even liked the frequent descents into a bastardised Franglais as people sought deeper connections. Mostly, I liked the weirdly comic moments:
He was drinking from a brown bottle, singing, and nodding his head with the momentum of the song. He really approved of this song. There wasn't much to do with this one, except agree.
It's a little hard to pinpoint the timeframe of this book – a character gets a job in Computer Programming, but no one appears to have a cell phone – and the specific rock songs that get Agathe's motor running seem to point to the late Eighties/maybe early Nineties: Agathe laughed and turned it up as Sheriff told her they'd never needed love like they needed her...Cheap Trick wanted her to want them...Trooper told her to see how it felt to raise a little hell of her own. (Unless the radio and the clubs are only playing the “classics”, lol.) Perhaps author Michelle Winters needed to place her story a bit in the past to make it preglobalisation; perhaps it's no longer possible to imagine a French-speaking couple, outside of Quebec, successfully isolating themselves from the wider Anglo community, and there's something interesting to think about in that. 

I picked up I Am a Truck because it was longlisted for the 2017 Giller Prize, and while it doesn't feel as weighty as some of the other nominated titles that I've read, I'm really glad that I was introduced to this book; ah, therein lies the beauty of the longlist.

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