Childhood

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

This novel by Toronto playwright André Alexis, which was short-listed
for the 1998 Giller Prize, centres on the efforts of a young
Trinidadian–Canadian scientist to come to terms with his southern
Ontario childhood.

The author outlines a curriculum for protagonist Thomas MacMillan’s
“sentimental education.” “History” covers Tom’s years in
Petrolia with his grandmother, evoking his background and her taste for
19th-century literature. The boy’s Ontario road trip with his
estranged mother and her Québécois lover, Pierre Mataf, takes place in
the appropriately titled “Geography” section. “The Sciences”
chronicles Tom’s Ottawa years with his mother and her live-in lover,
Henry Wing, an amateur alchemist. The story concludes with Tom sorting
out his life in “Housecleaning.”

Alexis demonstrates his storytelling skills in his description of the
death of Tom’s grandmother. Tom discovers her stiffened corpse in
front of “the television tuned to a station that hadn’t begun to
broadcast”; the narrative maintains its macabre overtones at the
appropriate sub-Hitchcock level. Although the novel concentrates on
Tom’s childhood, it includes sharp social observations. When he
returns to Petrolia, Tom notes that “the field in which I picked
dandelions [was] still a field, and that in itself was remarkable.”

André Alexis’s literary reputation has been enhanced by this
exploration of his lost Ontario.