Heather O'Neill and Catherine Leroux chat about French Canadian history, feral children & the power of words
CBC Radio | Posted: February 2, 2024 5:52 PM | Last Updated: February 2
Heather O’Neill is championing Catherine Leroux’s The Future on Canada Reads 2024
A Montrealer with a love for literary fiction and translation, it's no surprise that Canada Reads winner Heather O'Neill is championing the eerie and speculative novel The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou.
The Future is set in an alternate history of Detroit where the French never surrendered the city to the U.S. Its residents deal with poverty, pollution and a legacy of racism. When Gloria, a woman looking for answers about her missing granddaughters, arrives in the city, she finds a kingdom of orphaned and abandoned children who have created their own society.
O'Neill and Leroux, both Quebec writers, sat down with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan to discuss writing about wild children, the Canada Reads experience and creative uses of language.
The Future is set in a time where Detroit never became an American city. Catherine, why did you choose this alternate history to shape your story?
Catherine Leroux: I've written books before where the characters speak French because I write in French, but it's set in British Columbia or in the United States. So theoretically, the people that I'm giving dialogue and lines to are anglophone or speak Spanish. And that makes me feel uncomfortable about giving them too much local colour in the way that they speak.
Then I thought, 'Isn't there a way to make these people French somehow?' And then as I was reading about the history of Detroit, the answer came on its own. There was a time when people spoke French on this land and I thought, what exactly happened for that part of the world to become American or to switch to English? I realized that it was just a small thing in a treaty. And it could have very well gone the other way.
Heather, as a long-time Montrealer. You're familiar with both French Canadian culture and history and language. What did you make of this fictional French community in Detroit?
Heather O'Neill: The history of it was so interesting because I had been exploring the French influence on the South in Louisiana and how French mythology has kind of worked its way into different aspects of cities everywhere it's been. And I didn't know it was in Detroit.
And it's so funny because when I was in Detroit, I saw the most spectacular thing I had ever seen and it was this car and it was decorated out like a cockroach. And there were all these people dressed in dystopian costumes and little children, too, like demons on it and everybody chanting around it. And then I found that it was for the Nez Rouge.
And then this Nez Rouge, who becomes a character that everybody fears in Catherine's book, is actually a myth. And then Catherine is explaining how it comes from French culture with a mix of Indigenous culture. And in that area they created this idea of a Nez Rouge who was this kind of trickster figure who causes trouble. And every year they have this parade where they just go all out.
What I loved about it too was that it identified this isolated group and what happens to a language when it's on its own. - Heather O'Neill
What I loved about it too was that it identified this isolated group and what happens to a language when it's on its own. It also really reflected the French Canadian traditions in Quebec and how the language there has become its own dialect. And it's so unusual in its own way and it's included anglophone influences and just different sayings. So I love that parallel: what she's doing in Detroit and how it becomes this colloquial invention of language.
There's this community of wildlings living separate from the adults. Where do you pull inspiration to create this society of kids?
CL: It was actually one of the most difficult things to build and create in the novel. I knew exactly what I wanted, but initially in the first drafts, it was so boring. I kept concerning myself exclusively with how they slept and how they protected themselves from the rain and from the cold and how much they ate. And I reread that first draft and I was like, 'Well, I'm approaching this like a mom who wants all these fictional children to be as comfortable and well-fed as possible.'
Of course children will want to feed themselves and protect themselves from the elements and stuff. But they are also, especially when their life is difficult, perpetually immersed in their imagination and in play. - Catherine Leroux
Of course children will want to feed themselves and protect themselves from the elements and stuff. But they are also, especially when their life is difficult, perpetually immersed in their imagination and in play. And that's what was missing. But I tapped into play, imagination and the interplay of absolute kindness and love and spontaneous generosity that children can show and the absolute violence and mercilessness that they have in other circumstances. And those two things are not mutually exclusive in children. They cohabitate very beautifully, I think.
Heather, you've written about young people living on the margins of society. What about that world is so compelling for a writer and a reader?
HO: It's always a wonderful opportunity for language, which I love because it's almost like children are little aliens who are perceiving the world for the first time and have such unusual observations. And I find as a writer we're always looking to express the inexpressible in a different way and children just kind of naturally do that. That's why we're always repeating what they say, because it's so odd and the structure of it is so strange.
Catherine, your protagonist, Gloria, finds so much support and resilience and hope through her neighbours. And in The Future, community is a very powerful force for survival for the children but for Gloria as well. Why did you choose this narrative?
CL: There's this book by Rebecca Solnit that really got me thinking that's called A Paradise Built in Hell and she looks at earthquakes and floods and certain wars and the Halifax Explosion. And she looks at what the narrative around those events is, which is like, everybody's going to turn into a monster and we're all going to start stabbing each other and stealing toilet paper from each other and stuff like that, which can happen.
For the most part, when something terrible happens, cooperation is the main thing that is witnessed. - Catherine Leroux
But for the most part, when something terrible happens, cooperation is the main thing that is witnessed. So I think it's important to show that because I think that there's an element of like a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of the stories that we tell.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.