Not Everybody Lives the Same Way

January 24, 2022
Dubois’s engaging but oddly inert Prix Goncourt winner sees a middle-aged man recall his life from prison. Paul Christian Frederic Hansen, a longtime apartment building superintendent, is serving two years for an undisclosed crime in Montreal. His cellmate is Patrick Horton, a member of the Hells Angels awaiting sentencing for murdering a fellow biker. In between chronicling Horton’s struggles, which include a toothache, fear of rats, bowel movements, and anxiety over haircuts, Hansen examines his past. He grew up in Toulouse, France, where his Danish father, Johanes, was a Protestant pastor and his French mother, Anna, ran an independent cinema. His parents divorced after Anna screened Deep Throat in 1975, and Johanes moved to a small mining town in Quebec, where Hansen soon joined him. Dubois gets things off the ground with his portrayal of Johanes, whose loss of faith and a gambling problem cost the pastor his job; his subsequent death costs the novel its most intriguing character. Hansen moves to Montreal where he takes up the superintendent job and meets his wife, who flies a float plane. Bland interactions with building residents, plus wiki-deep digressions into miscellany like subprime mortgages, drag the plodding plot toward the inexorable reveal of Hansen’s crime. In the end, this comes up short.