Author Kevin Lambert.Julia Marois/Supplied
Lauded as the new face of Quebec literature in his home province, Kevin Lambert – who also goes by Kev – is, it’s surely safe to say, the first writer to have found his way to the literary world’s upper echelons through the aisles of a Chicoutimi Costco.
It was there, amidst the store’s industrial-sized vats of peanut butter and sewage-pipe-diameter tubes of beef, that the 32-year-old found the books that would open up a new world and transform his life, leading him to claim two of France’s major literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Médicis.
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks
Initially, he gravitated to fantasy. Series such as Silverwing, Harry Potter, Narnia and A Series of Unfortunate Events. Collectively, he took their existence as a sign that invisible communities of “sad children” such as himself must exist somewhere.
“The message of those books was always like the, the strange and unfitting kids: One day they will find a door to another dimension. And in this dimension, they will be accepted and loved,” Lambert said on a recent Zoom call from Berlin, where he was promoting the German translation of his second novel, Querelle de Roberval.
It’s yet another in a series of crazy months for the literary wunderkind. The Berlin trip was sandwiched between the release of the English version of Lambert’s third novel, May Our Joy Endure, and the promotion of his fourth, Les Sentiers de Neige, first in France, then in Quebec.
When he was a child, Lambert moved a lot. His parents, who separated when he was “around 2 or 3,” both worked in medical fields – his father as a physiotherapist, his mother as a pharmacist. He describes those households as neither cultured nor literary. Indeed, he knew just one reader: his grandmother, who voraciously consumed Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark and Nora Roberts (authors whom Lambert sometimes read as well). She took Lambert on those Costco trips, buying him a book each time.
Fantasy offered a gateway into crime as well as the novels of Agatha Christie, Lambert finding in the English writer’s fiction some of the themes – murder, class – that would later dominate his own. Though Chicoutimi, now part of Saguenay, north of Quebec City, had a solidly blue-collar reputation, he was sensitive at an early age to the many stratifications of class within his school, community and family.
The kids Lambert grew up with were always on the hunt to call out, and condemn, difference; especially when it came to sexuality. In public, he reacted to constant homophobic slurs by role-playing masculinity. In private, he searched out, and found, queer overtones in Ron and Harry’s relationship in the Harry Potter books.
(Though he’s currently in the process of transitioning, Lambert isn’t particular about pronouns: “I use every pronoun.” He says he can still read Harry Potter, despite his disdain for its author, J. K. Rowling – ”she became her own evil character, right?”– because he believes that, once published, an author no longer exerts “ownership” over their work.)
It’s no surprise then that Lambert’s first two novels brim, not just with viscerality and raw sexuality, but with anger as well. His debut, You Will Love What You Have Killed, written when he was just 20 shortly after he moved to the city to attend the University of Montreal, is a no-holds-barred, Tarantino-esque revenge narrative in which Chicoutimi, site of multiple infanticides, becomes subject to a biblical-level conflagration.
Was writing it cathartic? “Yes. I was taught to never express anger, so writing this book was like expressing all the anger that I had accumulated growing up. It was fun for that reason because it’s fiction, right? You don’t have to put nuance and to control your emotion.”
In conversation, Lambert has none of the guarded defiance suggested by his author photos – especially the early ones, which often have his striking blue eyes fiercely staring out from beneath heavy brows. The fact that he’s let his hair grow out has added a softness to his demeanour as well. An energetic gesticulator, he comes across as warm, open and thoughtful.
Revenge and class were also front-and-centre in his second novel, Querelle de Roberval, in which a charismatic stranger from Montreal arrives in a northern town during a strike at the local sawmill, and re-energizes its disheartened straight male workers by walking the picket line with them by day, and engaging in explicitly described sex with them by night. (The New York Times called it, non-sarcastically, “the erotic Québécois novel about labour conflict that we’ve all been waiting for.”) In France, Querelle bagged the Marquis de Sade Prize, while in Canada its English translation (by the great Donald Winkler) was shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
Lambert’s follow-up, May Our Joy Endure, published in English this past September, represented a sharp shift from its predecessors in tone and subject matter, not least because its protagonist is a billionaire “starchitect” named Céline Wachowski. Known for her iconic structures the world over (and her hit Netflix series), Céline has never built in her hometown, Montreal. So when she’s presented with the opportunity to design a massive complex for consumer behemoth WeBuy, she seizes it.
The project, however, soon ignites angry backlash around issues of gentrification, housing and social justice. Exacerbated by a long New Yorker exposé attacking her left-wing bona fides, the fiasco ends up precipitating Céline’s reputational downfall. Not just a simple tale of cancel culture, the novel gives ample, nuanced voice to Céline and her mindset, in particular her confusion and anger over being attacked by the same social crusaders who had been her allies, and whose values she still thinks she espouses.
Among other enjoyable details, the novel features a couple of cameos by real-life Montreal billionaire architect Phyllis Lambert (no relation). This makes sense, in context, but Lambert admits it was also strategic, as he didn’t want readers to take Céline as a thinly veiled portrayal of Phyllis (which she isn’t).
In previous interviews, Lambert has scoffed at those who place too much emphasis on the notion of originality in fiction (he has called copyright “a capitalist invention that has nothing to do with literature”). A student of aesthetics, he borrows freely, and openly, from the writers he admires. Querelle was a riff on Jean Genet’s similarly carnal Querelle de Brest and has obvious elements of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. May Our Joy Endure is an homage to Marie-Claire Blais, while its long, virtuosic opening chapter, which weaves between psyches at a who’s-who Montreal party, is taken from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (herself a major influence on Blais).
Inspired, in part, by the French writer and critic Hélène Cixous, Lambert says he often “speaks” to dead authors. Indeed, he was engaged in repartee with Blais the night before the Prix Médicis announcement. At the time, he was working on a theatrical adaptation of one of her books. He was not thinking about the prize (which he felt he had no chance of winning, given that the novel had already won the Prix Décembre – and no book had ever won both), nor the fact that Blais had been the first Canadian to win it (in 1966).
And yet the next day Lambert would become just the third (Dany Laferrière won in 2009), and the first to win the Décembre and the Médicis.
For Lambert, the Médicis win was a thrill, but also a kind of vindication, coming, as it did, on the heels of a couple of controversies that had drawn him into the public spotlight on both sides of the Atlantic. The first occurred when Quebec Premier François Legault wrote about May Our Joy Endure on Facebook, praising it as a “nuanced critique of the Quebec bourgeoisie” in which “pressure groups and journalists seek scapegoats for the housing crisis in Montreal.”
Feeling the Premier had missed the point, Lambert pushed back: “You are not scapegoats, you are people in positions of power who could do something and who do nothing.” In the social-media tempest that ensued, Lambert received support, but was also subject to threats and derogatory slurs.
A few months later, he was widely lambasted in the press in France for wokeism and self-censorship when it became known that he’d used a sensitivity reader to vet his portrayal of a Haitian character in May Our Joy Endure.
Despite the scandals, and his erstwhile image as a bad-boy, burn-it-all-down disruptor, Lambert has what feels like a very traditional desire to instill excitement about literature in others. Accordingly, he views media interviews (the depth and scope of the coverage he’s received in Quebec and France would make any English Canadian writer blush with envy) as both a privilege and responsibility.
“When I was younger, listening to media, there were so few interesting people talking about arts. Not enough for the hunger that I had. And so when I do it, I either talk about my process, which interests people that are interested in my books. But I also talk about other books. It’s important for me to try to use a little bit of my visibility to contribute to creating more space for literature and media. And it works with my creative process because I’m always inspired by other writers. I do a lot of aesthetic research. For me, it’s really natural and organic.”