Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

In the sort of way that Lolita is a fun-house mirror image of Tender is the Night, Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal is a reversal of Lolita. There are the same long stretches along western highways, fugitive stays in motels, a father and daughter skipping town to avoid a pursuer in a blue sedan, even references to events chronicled in the local dailies. And like Lolita, it is a meditation on wanderlust and nostalgia (which in both are so intertwined as to be interchangeable), on language and the prospect of communication. But if it is any version of Lolita, it is Kubrick’s 1962 film noir version wherein the tropes of a detective story are used to unfurl a world by glancing looks and suggestion.

When we first meet our heroine, Lilia, she is already in the act in the act of disappearing. That is, in a sense, what Lilia does best, having been spirited away from her mother’s home by her (non-custodial) father when she was seven, she had been living basically on the road ever since then. Even when her father managed to stop, she kept at it, moving from city to city and with barely any luggage, but always a particular faded Polaroid picture and a camera. This time, she was leaving Brooklyn, and a boyfriend named Eli. Because of the fracture in his world that she would reveal, he would follow her to Montreal. He says of her and his life before,

You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seemed all wrong to me. The inertia, I mean. The inertia made everything seem fraudulent. There we were, talking about art, but no one was doing anything except Lilia. She was taking pictures. She spoke four languages.”

Only to be corrected with “Five.” He is corrected by Michaela, the daughter of a private detective hired to track Lilia down, and she knows almost as much about Lilia’s life as her father does. Michaela has been obsessed with Lilia because she blames her for the dissolution of her family. Michaela is the reason Lilia is in Montreal, because she holds the key to Lilia’s past, just as Lilia holds the key to hers.

For Lilia, the unreconstructed past is why nostalgia and wanderlust are so intertwined. Deep down, these sensations are both about the inability to feel at home in the inhabited world, and since home has always been wherever is next, for Lilia they are literally the same thing. “Every town, to her way of thinking, held an alternative life.” And in some sense this was true because arriving at every town meant a new assumed name, a new past, a new story, and so a new world. But the necessity of making a new world altogether in every town she arrived in meant that her world was always disjointed from everyone else around her, made her world always unheimlich. At first, being unable to find a home in the world was from being chased everywhere they went, but eventually the traveling became its own end, always resulting in further travel, always more of the same.

The other running obsession within the book is language. There are Lilia’s four or five, Montreal’s obsession with its French and the engulfing English, and then Eli’s mournful collection of dead and dying languages. Eli’s collection of dead languages are for an unfinishable master’s thesis he means to save them with. In Montreal, unable to speak the purportedly doomed native language, and no closer to finding Lilia, he writes to his brother, “I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language.” Just as with his languages, he is unable to save her because the salvation he wants to provide is not something he has to offer. A language, as we know from Wittgenstein, is a mode of life. Just as he cannot save his languages by chronicling them, he can’t save her from anything because she doesn’t need a last speaker, nor a translator to be at home in the world.

Mandel writes prose that aspires to a delirious perfection. What she gives us in her debut novel is a lot closer than anyone has any right to expect. As unlikely and magical as some of the story may be (and there is not a little in the book that may as well be magic), the storytelling makes it all very believable. Mandel writes four intersecting story lines that span from Lilia’s remote childhood and to the weeks she spends in Montreal, all driving relentlessly to that last night. Lilia’s secrets (some unknown even to her) are revealed layer by layer. The plotting has all the efficiency and brutality of a steel trap, and all the intricacy of a pilot’s watch. The prose rightly shimmers.

Reviewed by James Liu

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
Unbridled Books, 2009
Cloth, $24.95
ISBN-10: 1932961682