Childhood: A Novel

Shifting times is difficult. Getting inside the head of a challenging character is, too. All accomplished with ease in this, Alexis' first book. Loved it. Stuck in my head well after finishing it.

This is a beautifully written book about Thomas MacMillan, a man who is recounting his childhood. He was raised by his grandmother until her death when he was ten years old. His mother, Katarina, then comes to small-town Ontario to reclaim him and take him with her and her lover to Montreal. They are abandoned by said lover near Ottawa and make their way to Henry Wing's home. Who is Henry? He is a man totally devoted to Katarina and to knowledge. Is he Thomas's father? The book explores love and family. We might not understand all the relationships, but we can see their impact on the lives of the characters -- as in life, perception and feelings are often more interesting and important than simple facts.

Thomas MacMillan is in mourning. His mother has just died and so has the man who served as his father for much of his life. He is overwhelmed but not sure by what. His relationship with his mother, other than the actual birth, didn’t begin until he was 9. She came to claim him after the death of her mother, his grandmother, whom he had been living with in the small town of Petrolia, Ontario. Katarina (his mother) arrives and takes him on a bit of an odyssey that ends in Ottawa, where, broke and abandoned by her current lover, she seeks shelter for herself and her son with Henry Wing, a curious figure devoted to her, with whom she maintains a distant relationship. Thomas recounts first his life with his grandmother, Edna, then his strange trek to Ottawa and finally the somewhat peculiar life that Katarina, Henry, and Thomas eked out in the nation’s capital.

Thomas is fluently bilingual having learned French from his Trinidadian-born grandmother. But he also encounters numerous other French speakers even in Petrolia. And so the story is interspersed with some french dialogue and carefully observed distinctions between French as Thomas was taught it (very strictly) and that spoken by one of Katarina’s French-Canadian lovers. Likewise the fact of Thomas and his family being black is underplayed, only to emerge when he encounters overt racism as a child and later. It’s just part of the fabric of his life; it isn’t his whole life. In fact, most of his life is lived in books and there he finds a true kindred spirit in Henry, whose house in Ottawa is stuffed to the rafters with books.

The language of the novel is rich, as befits a bookish narrator looking back. But he is a narrator who is uncertain about his own life and especially the significance of events and people. So he tends to focus at times on what appear to be distractions as tries to piece together what it all means. The narrative appears to be addressed to Thomas’ lover who we only see tangentially at the end. But in reality he is writing this for himself.

At times emotionally abrupt, at times lyrical, at times awkwardly attempting to place some order on disparate events — this is a novel whose maturity belies the fact that it was André Alexis’ first. And reading it now, it makes his later success seem inevitable. Gently recommended both for itself and for what it heralds in this writer.