The End

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Victor Joyeux is a 61-year-old concrete engineer who has built one
substandard bridge too many. He now faces coming to terms with his
life’s work and himself. Joyeux, whose name means Happy, admits life
has been good to him. He has money. He drives a Jaguar. He sleeps with a
21-year-old college student—and with her mother. What he is mortally
afraid of is the possibility that someday life may not be so good.
Business is failing and he is starting to go bald. Before either
business or baldness catches up with him, Joyeux intends to kill himself
by crashing a car into one of his own concrete viaducts.

The text of the novel is Joyeux’s last will and testament. It is less
a legal document than a monologue in which Joyeux tries to explain and
justify himself to his many wives and children. Although his story
unravels almost from the moment he starts telling it, Joyeux never
abandons his childlike faith that people believe what he says he is, and
he earnestly wishes that it were the truth. Though simply told, this
satirical novel takes the reader on endless loops in its exploration of
how Canadians in the 1990s relate to themselves and to the people around
them.