One for the Road

Michael Williamson was Reference Librarian at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa.

One for the Road is the second Archambault novel to be translated by Oberon Press’s house translator David Lobdell and published in Oberon’s series of translations. The book is well translated even though the English prose bogs down in a monotonous drone after one hundred pages while the French prose is still zipping along with its musicality and slippery verbs. The novel is the story of one man’s devastating mid-life crisis. The scene is Montreal and the time, the late 1970s. The unnamed protagonist, who is about forty, works as a clerk in a record store. He spends a lot of time sitting around his wife’s house at night, boozing it up, wondering why he has no ambition, wondering why his wife is having an affair with an anglophone Irish lout named Tommy, and why his stepson is down the hall in his room stoned out of his tree every night. If that scenario isn’t full enough, add to it worrying about lack of sex drive, the failure of Quebec’s political independence movement, and most people’s lousy musical tastes. There is practically no catharsis anywhere in this novel — a more graphic depiction of personal, social, and political alienation would be difficult to find. This makes for rather depressing reading even though the protagonist does snap out of it a little by the end of the book. Mr. Archambault has a very sharp eye for detail and mood: “What is more civilized, what is more liberating, than this nocturnal calm?... The hours fly by. I daydream, I make notes, I leaf through old magazines. I listen to the radio and play the records that nourish my neuroses.” Sardonic, angry, satirical, perceptive: all of these adjectives describe this quite powerful novel. Oh, and the protagonist (anti-hero?) finally gets out of the house, goes on a trip with his stepson, and confronts the fact that he does love his wife.