Kev Lambert (Julia Marois)

Kev Lambert doesn’t like to be placed in boxes. The Montreal-based author of 2022’s ferocious novel Querelle of Roberval and its newly translated follow-up, May Our Joy Endure (both books are translated by Donald Winkler and published by Biblioasis), tends to wriggle out of any attempt to pigeonhole them as a writer. Suggest that they are a Marxist and they will agree, to a point. “Marxism is one of my inspirations in my studies and my reflections about the world,” LAmbert allows, before immediately qualifying the comment. “I’m not really an ideological person. I don’t think like that, and I don’t work like that.”

Suggest they are a modernist, and the response is somewhat the same. “For this book absolutely,” placing a full stop on the subject. Before, that is, going a bit further. “What I share with the modernist tradition is an interest in inner lives. This is a book about architecture. But I also wanted to approach the inner life of my characters as an architecture in itself.” 

Whether or not critics see fit to call Lambert’s new novel modernist or Marxist, its international accolades have already brought it success. The French version of the book, published in 2022 by Montreal’s Editions Héliotrope as Que notre joie demure, was shortlisted for France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt, and won the Prix Médicis, the Prix Décembre (considered by some a kind of anti-Goncourt), and Quebec’s Prix Ringuet. May Our Joy Endure (out now) tells the story of Céline Wachowski, an internationally renowned architect who has her own studio, Ateliers C/W, and a reality television show, Old House, New House. When she turns her attention to her home city of Montreal, where she spearheads the development of a sprawling consumer complex in a disused industrial zone, she is accused of gentrification and pushing rents into the stratosphere; media and online vitriol get her ousted from her own company.

The novel is a kind of negative image of Lambert’s previous work, which focused on a violent strike by millworkers in small-town Quebec. Whereas Querelle of Roberval was about the rural working class, May Our Joy Endure focuses on the urban elite. Where the previous novel had a man at its centre, this one features a woman. For Lambert, the distinctions between the two arose out of one key absence from the earlier book. “Writing Querelle left me with this big question about bosses and the rich,” Lambert says. “My idea was to try and see the people who were invisible in Querelle. It made sense for me in a social way, because really rich people don’t want to be seen. They don’t want us to see how they live, where they live, what their day-to-day lives can look like.”

This also provided Lambert with a problem, since they do not exactly move in the same social circles as their characters. “Usually, I meet people who are close to the characters I’m writing,” Lambert says. “But this time I couldn’t really. How can you write to a billionaire and say, ‘I’m writing a book: what’s your point of view about your class’s demographics?’” 

The opening scene in the novel is an extended stream-of-consciousness party scene that introduces readers to Céline and her cohort as the narration weaves in and out of their individual psyches and perspectives. Lambert is acutely aware of the irony involved in dramatizing this and other scenes like it. “I was conscious that I was writing, in the first scene, about a party to which I would never be invited,” they say.

Admirers of Querelle’s abrasive, in-your-face approach and obvious affinity for the proletariat might be surprised by the tone and tactics Lambert adopts in May Our Joy Endure. This is not a banshee wail of a narrative indicting the ills of the super-rich and their impact on the current housing crisis, although the subject is central to the new work. It is at once quieter and more measured than the earlier book, taking the arguably radical step of attempting to portray Céline as a fully rounded character with whom we are meant to empathize, if not altogether sympathize. “I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit,” Lambert says. “We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea.”

The revised authorial attitude is not simply a response to the exigencies of a different story; it also, according to Lambert, reflects an adjustment in their own attitudes toward social conflict. “I value less and less confrontation as a strategy,” Lambert says. “We did a lot of this, but now I’m starting to think that we should try to have empathy. Which doesn’t mean stop criticizing or saying everything’s fine because we have empathy. But I think it gives you an understanding of humans that is more accurate and more useful for political engagement.”

There is violence, of a sort, in the new book, though it’s not the graphic bloodletting found in Querelle. The violence the rich exert on the working class, the poor, immigrants, and other demographics is submerged, in part because these social groups are invisible to people like Céline. It is precisely this unseen violence that attracted Lambert in the writing. “What interested me were the oblique effects, not just the direct impact,” they say. “It’s the idea of the corollaries that interested me. The most invisible thing – the thing that you don’t think about – that is most impactful.”

Another factor in the tonal or stylistic shift may be the direct inspirations for each book. Querelle was a reworking of a novel by Jean Génet, an author not exactly known for his restraint. “Génet is about making the language dirty,” Lambert says. “That’s why there is blood and sperm – he almost wants those bodily fluids to spray on the page.”

By contrast, May Our Joy Endure gets its inspiration – and its title – from Marie-Claire Blais (specifically her 1995 novel Soifs), an author who Lambert says is central to their own artistic sensibility. “She was continuing the modernist quest, trying to understand the inner life through her writing,” Lambert says. “She was inspired by Faulkner, by Woolf, by Proust, by Henry James, in a way. What Marie-Claire Blais does is try to erase the distinction between consciousnesses. Which is really modernist, but in my point of view, she pushes it further.”

Which may be the perfect touchstone for a modernist writer suspicious of being branded a modernist.