A Minor Chorus

May 1, 2022

A Lamba Literary Award winner and Canada's top-selling poet (see the LJ best-booked NDN Coping Mechanisms), Belcourt crafts a debut novel about a queer Indigenous doctoral student in Northern Alberta who temporarily deserts his dissertation to write a novel. Meanwhile, he converses with the closeted Michael and fellow student River and ponders a cousin trapped in the awful cycle of police violence, drugs, and despair.

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September 1, 2022
Following his essay collection, A History of My Brief Body (2020), poet Belcourt, from the Driftpile Cree Nation, continues his exploration of Indigenous trauma and queerness in this erudite debut novel. An unnamed narrator works on his doctoral dissertation but is drawn to the idea of writing a novel, believing it might be the way to realize a new world, ""one in which human flourishing wasn't inhibited for the marginalized, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any."" Focusing on the place he left--at the time, leaving seemed the only option for a queer teen--he returns to his rural Canadian hometown. He interviews friends and family, revisits his difficult relationship with his mom, and confronts the reality of his cousin, currently in prison after being caught in a web of drugs. In between, he has casual sex, analyzing the differences between rural and urban Grindr profiles and hookups. Belcourt's smart, thoughtful writing will appeal to readers who prize introspection over plot, and is also a great crossover for memoir readers.

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Starred review from September 12, 2022
Memoirist Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body) delivers an achingly gorgeous debut novel of Indigenous survival. The unnamed narrator, a 24-year-old queer Cree graduate student living in Edmonton, Alberta, has stalled on his dissertation in critical theory. He decides to leave the program and return home to northern Alberta to write a novel. For research, he interviews locals, including a great-aunt whose grandson has been arrested and a newspaper editor who never came out as gay after losing his first love to suicide. Even the narrator’s depiction of a hookup with a visiting white man veers into a precise, insightful excavating of trauma. A trip to the nearby residential school sparks an unpleasant encounter with an entitled white woman before the narrator returns to Edmonton for one last interview. Belcourt weaves in a steady stream of references to work by Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, and Maggie Nelson without losing narrative momentum, and he delivers incendiary reflections on the costs, scars, and power of history and community. This is a breathtaking and hypnotic achievement.

Starred review from September 2, 2022

DEBUT With his first novel, wunderkind Belcourt cements what has become increasingly clear across two poetry collections and a memoiristic book of essays: he is a fearless writer. Even the designation "novel" feels like a misnomer for a work as fluid as this, one that has far more in common with his poems and essays than any more traditional novel construction. Following an unnamed narrator who absconds from the "neoliberalizing machine" of academia to return to his home reservation to "represent the lives of queer and Cree people without the constraints of scholarly norms" and to "show that the disregarded sometimes live the most remarkable lives," the narrative remains defiantly unbridled by any restrictive modes of fiction. The guiding thread comes through the narrator's interactions with friends, family, and the past writ large, gifting readers a blisteringly intelligent and fiercely intimate deconstruction of the art of writing and an act of existential questing as "story." "Novels can feel like they "frame human existence and sensation so narrowly that a character can appear to be trapped in a structure without agency," says the narrator, and Belcourt's thrilling refutation registers less as minor chorus than symphony. VERDICT Less traditional "novel" than a ruminative constellation of ideas regarding colonial trauma, heteropatriarchy, and the innate sociality of writing; Belcourt's boldest, freest, and most linguistically assured work yet.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.