You always need a Madeleine
THE AMERICAN FIANCEE by Eric Dupont (Harpercollins, $35)
This is a rollicking riot of a novel. Often hilarious, sometimes tragic, confusing and downright bizarre, it tells the story of the Lamontagne family of Rivere-du-loop in Canada.
The family has an obsession with always having at least one living Madeleine in their tree and, when Old Ma Madeleine found her “oldest, ahem, swashbuckling behind a stack of firewood, his black tuft of hair rocking like a woodpecker’s head”, she went in search of a Madeleine for him.
The first died of Spanish flu within a week, so Old Ma wrote to her brother, who had mentioned years earlier adopting a Madeleine and asked if she was 16 — i.e. of childbearing age — yet. Yes, she was, came the response, in fact, she was arriving from America at the train station that very day.
Young Madeleine, the eponymous American, was a hit with the family, almost immediately pregnant and was then cast as Mary in the village’s nativity play, staged in the middle of a terrible blizzard that traps everyone in the church. We are treated to a laugh-out-loud description of festivities, from the nun whose voice sounded “as though a brussels sprout had started to talk” and the two small angels who could not decide who got the speaking part, so did it together and completely mangled their lines.
Madeleine, of course, goes into labour and what follows is the most tragi-comic birth scene I have ever read.
And the book continues in this vein: the child born that night was an unusually robust boy who went on to make his living as a strong man then an under-taker, marry and have children of his own, including a Madeleine who continues the story after her father’s death.
There’s violence, incest and murder in the mix.
The American Fiancee is a magnificent novel that is just as much about the storytelling as it is about the story. It branches off into meandering sidelines — most of which later prove integral to the story — and skips back and forth in time to flesh out the characters and their histories.
It’s a hefty tome that will take more than an afternoon to absorb but it is one that is worth the effort.