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language: English
country: Canada
year: 2022
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 29.11.22-1.12.22
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus was…fine. it felt a lot like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but with slightly clunkier prose and — somehow — even more poststructuralism. Barthes again features prominently. that Belcourt is a poet I think in this case was a bit of a negative, because it felt like his approach to writing prose fiction was essentially to combine poetry and academic writing and call it a day. this did not work for me.
on paper it sounds cool: the concept of an autobiography of a community is a good one, and the actual interview sections were (for the most part) really good. the problem is that it felt like the book didn’t quite know how to actually be the autobiography of a community — it clearly is trying, but it just as clearly actually wants to be the autobiography of the main character, and so it kind of sits unsatisfyingly in the middle. I think it would have been improved by either committing to voicing the community, in chorus, or narrowing the scope and sticking with the main character and Jack (clearly the character/relationship it’s most interested in). or like, making it an autobiography of the community through Jack’s life in relation to/contrast to/tension with the narrator’s.
I also think it suffered from the poststructuralism. I wish he’d just done what Delany does in the Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus texts and put theory epigrams on every chapter. instead the narration is like. “Michael’s story reminded me of Judith Butler’s observation that […]”. my friend. you must stop this.
ultimately though I think what it comes down to is this passage:
On the contrary, the news coming out of North America of late was, in a sense, an ongoing refutation of the novel, of anything that wasn’t direct action, that didn’t have to do with an immediate insurgency against those whose disregard for the livability of the oppressed amounted to a politics of socially engineered mass death. A novel, then, could be an indictment of the novelist, evidence of his inaction, his carelessness.
having made this observation early in the novel, I’m left to wonder: what is the point of this, then? I don’t feel like the book really knows, and so I’m left wondering why neither Belcourt nor the narrator commits fully to a politics against the novel. either you think your work has some kind of value or point, or you stop writing and commit to direct action, immediate insurgency, until the conditions exist that make writing possible for everyone, not just people who can afford it. until — as it were — Jack can write a novel.
I don’t know. I just wanted more, and it felt like the book wanted to be more but just didn’t quite know how.
moods: emotional, reflective