A lacerating comedy about France, cancel culture and the rental crisis

Telegraph

20-02-2025

'An affordable home had become rarer than a winter without rain.' So goes a typically acerbic line in Kevin Lambert's third novel, May Our Joy Endure. In the Francophone world, this social satire has won three prizes, including the Prix Médicis, and it isn't Lambert's first success: he published his first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, aged 25; then his breakout second, Querelle of Roberval, also garnered three awards. Both were translated into English by Donald Winkler, who has now translated May Our Joy Endure too.
Here, Lambert is tapping into several anxieties du jour: property, wealth, gentrification. He lampoons, too, our moralistic culture of public shaming, in which individual reputations are fair game in the tussle for political and financial supremacy. Like recent British novels such as Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonian Road and Sunjeev Sahota's The Spoiled Heart, it charts a spectacular fall from grace – that of its Québécoise protagonist, a celebrity architect in her sixties, who resembles Canada's Phyllis Lambert with some added Isabelle Huppert glamour. (Lambert herself makes a cameo appearance, whether to suggest or forestall comparisons.)
Céline Wachowski – not just an architect but a Netflix presenter, a brand, an 'icon' – is as beloved of the everyman as she is of the glitterati, until a scandal erupts around one of her projects, the Montreal headquarters of a tech multinational called Webuy. Amid an escalating rental crisis, and after a New Yorker article denounces Céline's role in accelerating gentrification, an immigrant evicted to make way for the Webuy project commits suicide. His story goes viral, sparking violent demonstrations that brand Céline a capitalist sellout. Soon she faces losing all she has built.
Lambert captures well the bloodlust and sanctimony typical of these public character-assassinations, in which former sycophants are the first to tear down the powerful. And the novel's architecture has a pleasing symmetry: it opens with a glittering party, through which the emerging controversy ripples; the second section delineates Céline's downfall; the third depicts another star-studded soirée that builds to a dramatic climax. The two parties offer vivid tableaux of intersecting psyches, as a close third-person narration flits between characters; in the intervening section, by contrast, dialogue and events are often reported indirectly, with detachment, and at such a pace that the timeline can be confusing.
Lambert's prose style loses something in Winkler's translation. What seemed comically overblown in French sounds pompous or convoluted in English: 'The building, despite its multifarious guises, harboured a unity conferred on it by its painful inexistence.' You become tangled in a 'labyrinth of clauses', a phrase Lambert applies to Proust's writing, though it begins to seem apt to his own.
There are errors – 'before embracing whole hog', 'an impressive roofing' – and some metaphors are laboured: 'Some waters ran on to be swept away in gutters to the parched earth, but this outflow, at the end of his quest, left him with a pure form, a crystal so hard that it would allow him to convey the essence of what he had discovered.' May Our Joy Endure highlights, to put it kindly, the delicacy of the art of translation.
On the other hand, Lambert has a knack for withering put-downs, and these survive: Céline's neighbours are 'little frozen-food tycoons', the New Yorker is a magazine 'whose barely concealed goal was to flood the world with those abominable tote bags'. The tone slides easily from parodic to philosophical, as Céline and her deputy, Pierre-Moïse, doubt themselves in the wake of the furore: 'What's a museum worth if it ruins poor families' lives?' Céline takes refuge in Proust and concludes that little has changed since his era; like his narrator, she has involuntary memories – glimpses of her childhood summoned by camellias.
In the Proustian tradition, with a little of Edith Wharton too, Lambert's novel is a lacerating comedy of manners that skewers the hypocrisy not only of the super-rich but of society itself, so eager to idolise success and so willing to turn on its idols. But May Our Joy Endure is a little too much like one of its parties: a whirl of ideas and perspectives, stylish and stimulating, yet a little exhausting to endure.