DOUBLE OCCUPANCY
Heather O’Neill’s The Lonely Hearts Hotel uses the language of an enchanting city
Heather O’Neill's new novel is a voyage across Montreal, from realms of innocence and districts of longing to zones of cruelty. You might be able to find the story’s orphanage on the city’s northern limits, and know where to locate Westmount mansions and Chinatown opium dens, but the map O’Neill's characters follow is mostly allegorical. That’s why the many hotels have names like the Darling and the Ravishing, and theatres are called the Ocean, the Velvet and the Neptune.
O’Neill's novels are all set in Montreal, but the city often feels like an odd double of the real thing. Elements of geography can be whimsical, and the languages skewed – we are often uncertain whether English or French is actually being spoken. These ambiguities are crucial to O’Neill's very personal vision of the city, contributing to the stunning impacts of Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night.
In The Lonely Hearts Hotel, the urban canvas has expanded both in space and time. The story begins in about 1910, in a Catholic orphanage, and unfolds across many of Montreal’s emblematic neighbourhoods to O’Neill's favourite, the Red Light district around Boulevard Saint-Laurent. It’s a sprawling saga that combines a fairy- tale narrative with touches of social history, following two orphans in their struggles against a hostile world.
Rose and Pierrot are foundlings, miraculously rescued from death and separately delivered as babies into the hands of the nuns. Early in their stay at the orphanage, they distinguish themselves as clowns and acrobats – and form an intense and passionate bond. Their ability to enchant their fellow- children and then the benefactors of the orphanage will be their ticket to life in the outside world.
The orphanage years are among the most compelling pages of the novel, with their evocation of a world apart – the irrational punishments of the nuns, the abusive sex, the invented entertainments of Rose, the gifted piano- playing of Pierrot. The orphan is for O’Neill a new version of the robust but damaged child of her earlier novels, and Pierrot and Rose come to represent the separate halves of this blend. There is social critique here too as O’Neill evokes the systematic cruelty to women that is so much a part of the institution.
The orphanage is in fact the true subject of the book – its emotional core – and once Rose and Pierrot l eave to embark upon the many plot twists that follow, there is a drop in the emotional temperature of the novel. The characters advance to their separate destinies, Pierrot on a downward trajectory, Rose making her way towards triumph and revenge. Their first stop is Westmount, where Pierrot will be treated generously by his benefactor, but where Rose, as a governess, will discover the brutal underside of genteel wealth. Both subsequently find themselves drawn downtown, attracted to the excitement and danger, the music and the tawdry sex, of jazz-age Montreal.
As the novel explores the clubs and peep- shows of the city, it draws a portrait of violence and stymied lives – by turn recalling the atmosphere of Michel Tremblay’s music halls, or Gaétan Soucy’s New York in Vaudeville!. A final section of the book, unnecessary to either plot or character development, in fact moves to New York, where the world of entertainment literally becomes the conduit for drug traffic.
But magic and enchantment struggle to remain part of the story. When Rose and Pierrot decide to look for one another after years of separation, they take on the task with the seriousness of a fantasy quest. Rose visits seven clowns in seven theatres, each time discussing the artfulness of the performer’s act. Pierrot meanwhile wanders his own path, sometimes narrowly missing her. This fanciful set- piece, with its combination of physical and metaphysical wanderings and with its formulaic repetitions, brings light and humour back to the narrative.
While most of the characters other than Rose and Pierrot are drawn i n very broad strokes ( the evil men especially), a few minor characters stand out: the desperate Mrs. McMahon who is a victim of her arrogant hus- band, for instance, and Poppy the Jewish prostitute. But even Pierrot remains a rather vague presence. The main story is that of Rose, who propels herself to fame in a Chicago- like series of manoeuvres.
O’Neill again provides us with the surprising language that is the hallmark of her work – the strange comparisons that interrupt the story and send the reader off on dreamy tangents. Speaking of the evil McMahon, the narrator notes, “He had a cigar between his teeth and the smoke coming out of it looked like a skinny girl pulling her undershirt down to her knees.” The irises of Pierrot’s eyes when he is stoned “look like garden flowers encased in ice.” Or: “When he lit up the thin cigarette, it made a slight sizzling noise, like the sound of a writer’s manuscript tossed into the fire.”
These interruptions are as much a part of the plot as the adventures of the characters. The English- French mix also colours the texture and tone of the narrative, though in The Lonely Hearts Hotel French is not so much an explicit presence as it was in the previous novels. A few pages have a sprinkling of French words, duly translated, but it is instead a presumed environment, the language of the nuns and of many of the other characters in the story. We understand that Rose and Pierrot are able to move confidently between linguistic worlds, and yet the double frame also provides a layer of uncertainty. The sense of these simultaneous layers mimics the way Montreal moves in and out of focus, enhancing the existential haze through which we experience the city.
Much of the power of O’Neill's work has been to conjure up an original and distinctive vision of Montreal, one that speaks to a changing perception of language boundaries. O’Neill's characters wander across these fault- lines, sometimes with magical ease. This purposeful vagueness flies in the face of literary tradition and may well contradict the everyday experience of many Montrealers, but what may seem like a casual lack of regard for boundaries has considerable symbolic impact. It puts the city’s double consciousness in new perspective, showing on the one hand a kind of irreverence for tradition and on the other pointing perhaps to increasingly casual cultural traffic across the city.
Like Rawi Hage, Monique Proulx or Nicolas Dickner, Heather O’Neill invents geographies fuelled by an obsession with the broken characters that haunt city streets. The Lonely Hearts Hotel attempts such a vision, but its large canvas and ever twisting plot weaken the emotional intensity that was so remarkable in her earlier novels. The roads that lead away from the orphanage also move away from the richly ambiguous passions of childhood, the best of O’Neill's imaginative spaces.
Sherry Simon is the author of Translating Montreal and editor of the recent Speaking Memory: How Translation Shapes City Life.
THE ORPHANAGE IS IN FACT THE TRUE SUBJECT OF THE BOOK – ITS EMOTIONAL CORE