André Forget's novel In the City of Pigs is a complicated love letter to Toronto
Nikky Manfredi | | Posted: September 23, 2022 4:47 PM | Last Updated: September 23, 2022
In the City of Pigs is on the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist
Having moved four times in the last four years amid a Canadian housing crisis and a global pandemic, In the City of Pigs is, in part, André Forget's fraught love letter to Toronto, where he was born.
In the City of Pigs centres around a failed musician desperate to make something of himself in a new city. Trying his hand at journalism, Forget's character soon finds himself exposed to the sordid underbelly of high-powered elites where, navigating his own impulses and material desires, he must decide the kind of person he wants to be.
Raised in Mount Forest, Ont. and now living in Sheffield, U.K., Forget is the former editor-in-chief of The Puritan, and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers in Canada and the United States.
Inspired by the rhythm of a metropolis and classical music, the debut novel is structured like a symphony with overlapping themes and distinct sections that each have their own "internal progression," Forget said, to produce a novel less concerned with a traditional plot sequence than it is with the emergence and accrual of meaning throughout.
In the City of Pigs is on the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The shortlist will be announced on Sept. 27, 2022.
Forget spoke with CBC Books about how the excitement and tension of growing up, both as an individual and as a city, influenced his debut novel.
A millennial coming-of-age
"I think of it as a coming-of-age story — but it's a coming-of-age story of a millennial. My feeling of where culture was in the early 2010's was a dominant feeling of a certain type of cynicism and a certain type of irony.
"In the 19th century novel, the progression is often 'the starry-eyed provincial goes to the city and has to wise up' but that didn't really make sense for the culture that I was seeing around me and my own experience going through my twenties.
What I saw was a lot of people who affected a kind of cynicism and having to take seriously that there was something cheap about that cynicism.
"What I saw was a lot of people who affected a kind of cynicism and having to take seriously that there was something cheap about that cynicism. Especially after 2015, there was this feeling that 'oh, maybe earnestness does have a place. Maybe we should be serious about something.'
"That was a big part of my own experience. So, I wanted his character arc to be: 'He thinks that he knows it all, he's seen it all, that he isn't going to be fooled by any of this nonsense.'
"By the end of the novel, I wanted him to arrive at a place where he actually starts to question some of that cynicism."
Writing a 'Toronto novel'
"A lot of the book was written when I was living in Russia and the United States back in 2018 and 2019. I was away from Toronto and I missed the city.
"In one of the early drafts, my wife pointed out that it really was a Toronto novel, that a lot of what made the novel work for her was depictions of the city. That's not something I set out to do, but it's something that I eventually owned. There's the theme of the city and of music and these ideas of being artistically in a fraught place — where do you go from here? What does it mean to create art in this time?
"I was born in Toronto in the late eighties. The city that my parents lived in. That time is almost unrecognizable in some ways. There is this excitement to Toronto about this sense of dynamism, about things always happening and the actual physical space of the city being remade all the time. But there's also a great anxiety in that, especially as somebody who is a renter, who will always be a renter in all likelihood.
There's the theme of the city and of music and these ideas of being artistically in a fraught place — where do you go from here? What does it mean to create art in this time?
"What does it mean to live in a city that has that dynamism and then to feel that, 'Well, do I get my lease renewed this year? Do I get to keep living in this place this year or do I have to move because the rent goes up? I can't afford it anymore.'
"Those anxieties are felt by a lot of people and I don't think artists are the group we need to be most concerned about here. I think the pressure on working class people and especially those within immigrant communities is immense.
"That was something that was on my mind constantly."
Defining Success
"I've always been rooted economically in something else. I never expected to make money off my writing. Success can be a very damaging concept with art. The success that matters to me is that I can reread this book and feel that it was the best version of it I can make. The motivation is very internal for me.
I was absolutely gobsmacked to see that this book got the accolade that it did, ending up on the Giller longlist.
"I was absolutely gobsmacked to see that this book got the accolade that it did, ending up on the Giller longlist. I hope that people will read it. I hope that people will like it.
"But if they don't read it and they don't like it, that can't be the metric for me. The metric has to be something internal, otherwise you just get crushed and your entire sense of yourself is contingent on whether or not it's popular or whether or not it's being reviewed.
"I'm too sensitive to work that way."
André Forget's comments have been edited for length and clarity.