Boy, interrupted

>> Sylvain Trudel’s teenage existentialist in Mercury Under My Tongue is more than tragically hip

by Juliet Waters

Mercury Under My Tongue by Montreal author Sylvain Trudel is not a book that should be judged by its cover.

Anyone looking at the healthy teenager lying across the hallway of a hospital ward, feet propped up irreverently against the wall, will have expectations.

According to the back cover, this is the story of Frederick Langlois, who could be that “geeky, seventeen-year-old notebook-toting sage found in every high school, feeling deeply, spouting out tiny poems, just a little too old for his years. But Frederick isn’t in high school. He’s in a hospital ward with other critically ill adolescents, dying of bone cancer.” The back cover goes on to promise us “comic moments” in the ward, “emergent friendships” and glimpses of psychotherapist cleavage. Anyone picking this up is going to imagine it a worthy addition to the growing genre of young adult fiction.

Fortunately, I didn’t have those expectations. Soft Skull Press, the American small press, which has published the English translation, is something of a refuge for dark minded Canadian cult authors like Lydia Millet (George Bush, Dark Prince of Love), and Michael Turner (The Pornographer’s Poem.) The blurbs from the original French-language reviews better represent Trudel’s book: “brutally lucid,” “an intense novel, with… powerful and bitter venom,” “the existential crisis of a young man who is growing up much too fast.”

Still it’s hard not to think of those readers raised on J.D. Salinger, and other American existential crisis lit that thrives on the minimalist and the bleak. These are the readers that made a hero of James Frey, and his thousands of little sentences, long before Oprah misjudged his “authenticity.”

Trudel’s hero, in contrast, is very French. Frederick is fearless in his tendency to crank up the existential posturing, the poetry, the blasphemy, the self-conscious arrogance and basically the tendency to write. English teenagers aim to write like they think and speak, in short, fragmented bursts. Frederick comes from small-town working-class parents in Quebec, but he’s clearly been self-nurtured on Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Rare is the English working class teenager who’s ever going to write a sentence like “that’s the good thing about melancholy: it’s a kind of cheap caviar that’s within everybody’s reach.” For some reason, this doesn’t come off as cheap French existentialism. It comes off as the desperate posturing of someone fleeing his family, his roots, his friends, anything to remind him of what he’ll be leaving behind.

For all his posturing, however, there’s little doubt that Frederick is a genuine atheist. This is a story about a young kid dying, but it’s also a pretty convincing meditation on the right to die a godless death. Most of the dramatic tension in the novel arises from Frederick’s adamant refusal to die the young saint’s death that’s been scripted out for him by his well-meaning, Catholic community.

The “comic moments” and “emergent friendships” are few and far between. There’s the gallows humour of the kid who convinces everyone that his penis is growing a tumour, by placing a Cheerio under the foreskin. Frederick develops a crush; but chemo for her, and bone cancer of the hip for him, rule out the possibility of much more. His closest friend, Benoit, suffers from kidney ailments that lead the nurses to place his urine in flasks along the windowsill. “The morning sun rises in Benoit’s golden piss, through the glass flasks, and the light in our room is like the beautiful light from a stained-glass window.”

But Frederick is mostly his own best friend, or worst enemy, depending on how you read this book. Is he a hero who sticks to his existential identity and artistic vision, despite all the pressure to do otherwise? Or is he a case of psychic suicide, merely camouflaged by a terminal illness? To his credit, Trudel does a masterful job of leaving that up to the very adult reader intended for this book.

Mercury Under My Tongue by
Sylvain Trudel, trans. Sheila
Fischman, Soft Skull Press,
PB, 159PP, $13.95