The Future
Catherine Leroux (Translated by Susan Ouriou)
Biblioasis, 2023
Review by Marcie McCauley
Catherine Leroux’s novel The Future (freshly translated by Susan Ouriou) presents a complex, layered story that probes how people navigate turbulent times, alone and together. She asks how we preclude and invite possibilities, and whether our relationship to change causes harm or helps.
As the novel opens, a man’s been struck and killed in the road—a neighbour’s father—but Gloria remains rooted. She observes from the front door of the house previously inhabited by her daughter and two granddaughters, too encumbered by the past to respond to a crisis in the present.
Gloria’s neighbour moves quickly towards the sound like a “hacking cough, a beam giving way after years of wear and tear” and, thus, the cast of characters gradually expands, so that community takes centre stage. Gloria’s own grief, however, leaves her ill-equipped to respond to another’s loss. Gloria has only lived in this house for ten days and only because her daughter was murdered here. Her granddaughters’s whereabouts are unknown—even their clothing is missing.
The hit-and-run awakens something in Gloria; it reignites her responsiveness. Soon, when she imagines that a sunbeam is a lick of flame, she finds herself instinctively “moving to extinguish the spark igniting the wall’s warped covering.”. Soon, she knows her neighbour’s name, and understands that they both have unanswered questions about loved ones they’ve lost. Soon, the narrative expands further outward, so that readers can observe this theme reverberating on a broader scale with several characters: residents and refugees, who are fearsome and fearful, youthful and aged.
Leroux’s story is dense with characters and rich with scenic detail. But, as the opening scene illustrates, this isn’t a ruminative, quiet story. There’s a sense of urgency in these characters’ lives: food is scarce—justice scarcer—and survival precarious. The tension inherent in the story is heightened by readers’ growing understanding of the characters, so that we adopt their concerns and struggles. Stylistically, the pacing intensifies with skillful use of dialogue and world-building too.
The story is set in Fort Détroit. Historically this French colonial settlement—part of present-day Detroit, Michigan—was held by the British after the French ceded Montreal in 1760. (It was demolished early in the nineteenth century, which suits a novel about what’s lost and what remains.) But Leroux’s Fort Détroit was never ceded by the French. Her imagined contemporary view of it is post-industrial, with some aspects of the historic French settlements still intact, and the river still significant (as is the St. Lawrence River in Leroux’s Montreal).
Readers gradually assemble an understanding of both geography and history through organic conversations among characters. Particularly when it comes to more recent political events, there are lively and enduring debates, which reinforce the idea that history is subjective. How people reflect on the past reveals as much about them as it reveals about another time. “That’s the problem with Fort Détroit,” Solomon says. People think there’s nothin’ good here, so the good stuff goes bad.”
Solomon’s voice is pivotal for readers’ understanding because he’s passionate about history— a trait he inherited from a fortune-telling ancestor who “predicted the city’s fate.” His willingness to ascribe some mystical elements to past prognostications creates a space for those who value the companionship of ancestors in stressful times. Simultaneously, he underscores the power that individuals possess to shape their worlds.
Through Solomon, readers hear about the strikes and demonstrations that precipitated the “actual uprising.” Readers must fill in the blanks for themselves, however, about “the epidemics, the damage, the austerity. The exodus, the children orphaned by drugs. Even the return of wildlife.”
A younger character, who wasn’t present for these historical events, has a more philosophical perspective on the same pattern of chaos and resurgence. She observes the “way fields are violated by crops or houses go up in flames, and it doesn’t matter because plants resprout, houses grow back, stumps transform sooner or later into new limbs, nothing really disappears, everything is already here, destroyed and resuscitated at once.”
And Gloria matter-of-factly expresses this spiral too: “That’s changing. Changing faster than I can keep up with. That’s always been the way. Everything changes too fast for me.”
The variety of characters in Leroux’s narrative reveals how complex people’s responses to difficulty and trauma are, how diverse and unpredictable, even when inhabiting the same space and experiencing the same stressors. For, beyond individual characters, the story considers human behaviour: “To possess and to abandon. To devour and to reject.”
But the outlook is not as grim as Solomon’s observations about Fort Détroit suggest. Some characters directly challenge his position, and even those who aren’t interested in history recognize the validity of other perspectives. “Détroit is founded on a dream as much as a crime,” one says.
Leroux dedicates her novel to her children; ultimately, her view is hopeful. So, when Gloria finally enters her neighbour’s house, she finds it’s “one of those homes that forever brings vegetable stew to mind. The furniture, the rugs, the colour of the walls, everything has a hint of stew, the very essence of stew. Comfort, force of habit, a certain blandness coupled with a feeling of safety.”
Within the context of community and children, questions of intimacy and trust, dependency and desire emerge. One character muses: “Babies are transitory beings, and their closeness is an illusion.” Readers ponder intergenerational disappointments and opportunities and view younger and older characters responding to crises. One child privately muses, for instance, that “everyone thinks he has no memories, but that’s wrong, it’s just that he can’t choose or call them up at will; they appear without warning and leave without explanation, as fleeting and intense as bombs.” Another observes that her sister’s “birth had been like a prison break…fleeing the womb like a dungeon.”
It’s a child in the story who notes, of another, that she’s “doing nothing other than thinking, yet still managing to change the world.” It’s a child who asks another to tuck a book into their pants’ waistband because he understands that stories hold power too. Children take initiative and action; they interact with and affect their environments.
Leroux’s imagined patois is vibrant and credible, and Ouriou’s translation showcases playful aspects of her storytelling. When Gloria’s neighbour recalls the two girls who’d lived there with their mom, for instance: “Like two bum cheeks in the same pair of underpants, those two.” A quiet moment of disarray includes: “The drawers stick out like soldiers saluting.” And figurative language is often nature-based, appropriate for this post-industrial setting: “The sun’s rays lay an egg in the middle of the fields.”
There are thematic glimpses of The Future in Leroux’s earlier works. In The Party Wall, a character is haunted by having left the scene of an accident, unable to assist, and leaving behind two injured girls. And, near the end of Madame Victoria, the “world seemed ready to tip over.” (Both works were translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler.) Throughout, Leroux is preoccupied with relationships and autonomy, perspective, and possibility.
Like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals, Saleem Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu, Leroux is forecasting, imagining, and provoking. The Future urges us to contemplate how and whether we cooperate or compete when we imagine a future for ourselves; she reminds us that it’s unfolding right now, that we are the unfolding.
Marcie McCauley reads, writes, and lives in Ontario on the homelands of Indigenous peoples–including the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat–land still inhabited by their descendants. Her writing has been published in American, British, and Canadian magazines and journals, in print and online.