A Fine Ending

By Louis Rastelli
Insomniac Press
328 pages
ISBN978-1-897178-49-2
$21.95

Reviewed by Marianne Ackerman

In the works of Mordecai Richler, Trevanian and Michel Tremblay, Montreal’s Blvd. St. Laurent appears as an immigrant’s Via Dolorosa, where ambitious upstarts vie with petty criminals for trade. How times have changed. These days, The Main offers sweat yoga, restaurants with valet parking and designer fashion sold at High Street prices. First-time novelist Louis Rastelli has captured the transition with a beautiful, sometimes heart-rending fictionalized memoir, A Fine Ending, set during the 1990s when youth replaced immigrants as the neighbourhood’s dominant flavour.

Nobody really knows how bohemia starts, but cheap rent seems to be an ingredient. During the two decades between the election of the Parti Québécois and the 1995 referendum, the Plateau, as the flat grid of streets east of Mount Royal has come to be known, offered the best deals since the Depression. Migrants poured in from across Canada, others from the very Montreal suburbs built by immigrants who’d struggled to escape; practically everybody was some kind of artist. Non-descript bars became performance venues where newly-minted bands gathered fans and momentum. A handful went on to international fame, but Rastelli has been careful to leave out their names. Nor does politics much intrude. The 1995 referendum goes by unmentioned.

This tale runs on enchantment. One man’s attachment to his cats Bindy and Pappy and the terrible things that befall them provide the emotional thread, creating a parallel existence amid the humdrum pathos of paying rent, hoping for love and keeping a creative flame alive.

The narrator – also named Louis – is a suburban refugee who floats back into town after a stint living in Kitchener studying architecture. No great events befall him, yet as in all great fin de siècle novels, apocalypse hangs in the air. His trials include coping with a stream of obnoxious flat-mates and friends who get by on “couch surfing” (crashing), battling furious landlords, holding and going to parties with his best friend Liora, an unexplored relationship that may well explain why no one else hangs around long.

A girl he chats up in a bar admires his t-shirt, whips off hers and offers an exchange. For a moment he believes he might be having “a rare Plateau experience” - meeting and getting to know a total stranger from scratch. But no, it turns out Kirsten has read one of his chap-books and knows most of his friends.

The quintessential beta male, Louis is the guy you think you can count on to look after your cats when you go on tour. Lying in bed with Stephanie, as stoned as they can be, he reflects on a year just ended, musing that maybe something has solidified. “Our sleepover conversations drifted off on tangents so quickly they seemed logical. ‘Do you know how to make good coleslaw?’ she asked me. ‘No, but I’d love to learn.’ Another long silence.”

The novel includes several hilarious set pieces, one set in a private church where beer is served while a self-appointed pastor rants from the Bible, digging up the dirt and haranguing the assembled into accepting his dark theology. When the ice storm plunges much of Montreal into darkness in 1998, forcing people to huddle together in public shelters or hole up with candles in each other’s living rooms listening to transistor radios, Louis and his friends go to a bar. An older man (possibly in his fifties) joins the conversation, explaining how the system of mortgages effectively ties people to their homes, payments, jobs and thereby to the wheels of economy, which ends up dictating every important aspect of their lives until death. His lecture leads to an uneasy silence and more beer, as if the assembled have just glimpsed their collective future.

A Fine Ending reads like a middle of the night yarn from a slightly stoned scribe who has set himself the task of telling everybody’s story - for a laugh or at least a smile. Yet hovering overhead is a powerful metaphysical gravitas heightened by the narrator’s innocence. Evil and death surround him, lives are ruined by drugs and drink, clouds of violence and doom gathering. Fittingly, the story ends on the last night of the Twentieth Century in a melancholy scene heavy with foreshadowed nostalgia: something sweet and good is going, gone.

With hindsight, we know it wasn’t politics or terrorism or even the fake demon Y2K that killed their world. It was Montreal’s return to prosperity. Once politics had ceased being a local obsession, gentrification invaded the Plateau, but so did a slew of not uninteresting jobs for a generation now facing forty. Some might count themselves lucky, others not. In the context of the roaring present, when time to kill is rare commodity indeed, A Fine Ending will strike many readers as thoroughly exotic, a splendid account of a time out of mind when a man could stretch out on the carpet at 3 a.m. and play with his cats.

Marianne Ackerman’s first novel, Jump, is set on the Plateau during the 1990s.