The Alley Cat

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English (Canadian Literature) at
Laurentian University.

Accompanied by expectations of another triumph, L’enfirouape won the 1974 Prix France-Québec. Le Matou, Yves Beauchemin’s second novel, was published in Québec in 1981. As the cover of Sheila Fischman’s translation, The Alley Cat, boasts, newspapers reviewers bestowed on it superlatives and the public bought “over 1, 000,000 copies worldwide.”

The novel describes the ups and downs of about a dozen people in Montreal in the 1970s. The focus is on Florent Boissoneault, a man of 26 who is trying to establish himself in business. He suffers various setbacks to his ambition, apparently instigated by Egon Ratablavasky, who lurks (like an alley cat) throughout the novel. Initially, Ratablavasky helps Florent arrange the financing to buy the restaurant of Florent’s dreams, but their association becomes highly convoluted and Florent decides that Ratablavasky is a villain, although the latter denies it. (The reader does not learn the truth.) Incidentally, Florent and his wife befriend a feisty but lovable street urchin, Monsieur Emile, whose mother is a prostitute with parenting skills that result in Emile’s becoming a sadistic alcoholic thief at age six. Other friends and relations of Florent also provide amusement and opportunities for satire on Quebec life. The villain of this piece is unemployment: most of the book’s characters suffer from it and are motivated and degraded by it.

However, The Alley Cat is mainly style with little substance. Beauchemin loads his writing with irrelevant similes. After Florent asks for Ratablavasky’s room, for instance, the hotel clerk is “stunned, like a small-town first communicant dazzled by Grace” (p. 9). Yet Florent is anything but religious: the simile comes from the author, not from the characters, as most of the hundreds of them do. These authorial intrusions fend off the reader, making impossible all but the most superficial understanding of the characters. Ratablavasky’s motives and character are ambiguous, and so are Florent’s. Because of the latter’s centrality, the reader is predisposed to side with him, but Florent’s obsession with money, his chauvinistic attitude to his wife, his lies to his friends, his hiring of a thug to rough up Ratablavasky, all undermine Florent’s status, making him more clearly villainous than Ratablavasky. Again, this inversion might work had the reader been allowed inside the characters instead of being left outside to admire the author’s attempts at inventiveness.