Blue Mondays

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

Chronicling the 1969-1970 winter of his discontent, the daily journal entries of a young working-class Anglophone, one Dave Fennario, make up this novel about life in Verdun during the hiatus between the hippie era and the F.L.Q. crisis. Moving from job to job as a warehouse worker or a stockboy, the narrator struggles to give meaning to his life in a society that has alienated him. His unfulfilled needs are partially met by Friday night pizzas shared with his live-in girlfriend, unemployed afternoons at the library, and membership in a fossilized Socialist faction which meets infrequently in a dusty boardroom of the Queen’s Hotel to study turn-of-the-century socialist scripture. But he is frustrated in his attempts to make a better life for himself and spends as much time as possible in employees’ washrooms keeping his journal up to date on company time. The one institution that seems to offer him a way out is the community college, but he is as distrustful of that prospect as Groucho Marx is of country clubs: “…if I can get into college,” he reasons, “then there must be something wrong with college.” As spring approaches, however, he makes the major decision of his life to that time, changing it, he hopes, for the better.

Blue Mondays is written in the style of a talented but uneducated writer, and Fennario the author captures quite well the essential qualities of Fennario the narrator. The writing is characterized by clipped participial phrases and sentence fragments, which give a sense of immediacy and vitality to the novel. The narrative is interspersed with poems by Daniel Adams and illustrations by Sheila Salmela. Both the poetry and the illustrations complement the novel’s basic themes, giving a wider perspective to the immediacy of Fennario’s prose.

At times Blue Mondays almost threatens to shed its novelistic apparel and reveal itself as an apology for socialism. Yet, although conflicts of culture, class, language, and economics are all present, Fennario never offers any immediate solution to these problems; the dialectic of oppression, the novel seems to suggest, runs along more intangible lines. At any rate, there is in Blue Mondays a sense of simply wanting to get on peacefully with the other six days of the week. As Fennario says in the introduction: “And at least, if nothing else, we’d like to announce that the war is over...and nobody won.”