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A Novel
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Book Reviewed by:A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief.
In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack's life parallels the narrator's own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds.
A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.
Excerpt
A Minor Chorus
In the end, the idea came to me suddenly, as I was walking with River in a park near their neighbourhood. We were talking about the summer night I had sex with a man in the basement of a parking garage. I said it was the most alive I had ever been because I felt so close to death. "Don't worry, I'm not going to kill you," the man said before he stripped naked. River said people didn't naturally make the kinds of decisions I did when I was cruising. Once we stopped laughing, it occurred to me that I wanted to examine how we live under conditions of duress, both visible and invisible. My novel, then, would be a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility. My informants would all come from the same place: the town in which I was raised, in a region heretofore unexplored in Canadian letters. I would write a book that reflected a community's emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. I would drive into town...
The narrator, a queer Cree grad student in Edmonton disillusioned with the university, has decided to pause work on his dissertation to write a novel. His research will involve returning to his rural Alberta hometown to interview some of the residents there. The story before us may be the eventual novel the narrator writes, but we are also in the position of traveling alongside him as he pieces together what he wants it to encompass, viewing his scattered thoughts about literature, theory, queerness, indigeneity, and more, which gives the writing an off-the-cuff feel. Possibly my favorite language in this endlessly quotable book lies in some of its more visually oriented, descriptive passages, in particular one that reminds me of Yuri Herrera's depiction of the United States in Signs Preceding the End of the World. Belcourt writes of the Canadian countryside—an ordinary, loaded term—near his hometown with a consciousness of everything it contains. This description, at once quotidian, menacing, and hopeful, calls attention to how politicized a landscape can be...continued
Full Review
(1213 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
A Minor Chorus is a rare gem of a book. We will be reading and rereading A Minor Chorus for decades to come. Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster
No one breaks your heart as elegantly as Billy-Ray Belcourt. Innovative, intimate, and meticulous. Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
An absolutely dazzling confluence of big ideas and raw emotions, told in Billy-Ray Belcourt's singular poetic voice. A Minor Chorus is about loving, questioning, and fighting for your life, and it's as compelling a debut novel as I've read in years. Katherena Vermette, author of The Strangers
A truly exceptional novel about how the disregarded sometimes live the most remarkable lives. A Minor Chorus is like a song that's over too soon; I want to play it on repeat, to memorize the words so that I can sing them to myself.
Billy-Ray Belcourt's A Minor Chorus examines aspects of the human condition in a way that is deeply erudite but also intensely physical. Through this approach, Belcourt demonstrates how the problems and questions of existence don't reside in some nebulous realm of the mind, but are bound up in the politics of how we inhabit our bodies, and how we move inside them in space, freely or otherwise. For the book's unnamed narrator, a queer Cree grad student who returns from Edmonton to his rural hometown to gather material for a novel, the philosophical despair he feels about his own life and life in general is inextricably connected to the physical and material realities of his existence as a gay Indigenous man in a settler-colonial state.
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