Bellevue Square

I’m in New York, but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m sane (I think?), but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m done Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square, but it doesn’t feel like it. Because try as I might, I can’t shake this novel. Its brooding sense of place and strange unreality have burrowed under my skin.

Bellevue Square tells the story of Jean – a wife, mother, and bookstore owner in downtown Toronto. As she describes it, “I have a bookshop called Bookshop. I do subtlety in other areas of my life.” When several of Jean’s customers tell her she has a doppelgänger named Ingrid who hangs out in Kensington Market, Jean begins a downward spiral of searching, surveillance, and slipping her own skin.

Bellevue Square is clearly a novel about mental illness, but because Jean is a highly unreliable narrator, that’s about all that’s clear. Stylistically, the prose mimics her descent into madness. At the beginning, it’s direct and dialogue-driven. By the end, it dissolves into short scenes and mutating montages. Jean’s memories twist and turn, creating the uncomfortable sensation that you’re living in – rather than merely reading about – her besieged consciousness. But it’s a fine line between mental unraveling and literary unraveling, and I often had difficulty simply getting my bearings as Jean scours the city for signs of her alter ego. Which was probably the point, but was still a pain in the ass.

The easiest way to take on this tale of a woman (or two?) coming undone is to distance yourself from it, but Redhill won't allow that. He insistently points out parallels between Jean's life and the lives of others, confronting readers with questions of their own grip on reality. As Jean frequently observes, even sane people stand on the brink of insanity sometimes:

“Many of us are only a few squares from pure lunacy anyhow. That you so rarely get to the final square gives you and everyone around you the reassuring illusion of your solidity . . . but crazy is normal. I’ve been crazy before and I’ll be crazy again. It’s everyone’s biggest secret: those times they’d wondered if they’d lost it and those times they knew they had.”

Beyond being a novel about madness, this is also a novel about the Toronto I know: a pastiche of universal Canadianisms such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Tim Hortons sprinkled with references that reveal Redhill's intimate knowledge of the city: CAMH, NOW Magazine, and Wanda’s Pie in the Sky. In his descriptions of Kensington Market, Redhill exhibits a skill I love in writers – the ability to turn tolerance of urban grit into a mark of membership:

“Pee, dog turds, and decomposing mice are only some of the fragrances of Bellevue Square in springtime. I long ago stopped noticing these undertones to the market’s stinky chiaroscuro, but it can be a challenge for first-timers, and when we walked into the park, Ian pulled his head back, as if he could save his nose from going in. That’s ... fucking foul,” he said.”

Redhill also puts his own twist on the truism that Canadian authors are obsessed with the weather. Rather than opining about rushing rivers or snowy vistas, Redhill writes about the seasons with a city sensibility, meditating on the quality of springtime light through a hospital window, the gloopy texture of slush on sidewalks, and the way cold slowly seeps through protective layers of newspaper placed atop a stone bench.

And while Jean’s career as a bookseller turns out to be a delusion (again: I think?), Redhill uses it as a vehicle for many interesting observations about how reading relates to life. This was one of my favorites:

“My experience of my life is the same as my experience with books: so vital when I’m present, forgotten afterwards. I can barely recall the names of the main characters in my favorite novels. I feel their longings and I might still fear for them in a specific way, but I can’t remember very much ... where does it go, all this happening? The books that took root as pictures and sounds in my mind - sensations sometimes absolutely like life - are gone as soon as the book is finished. Same as my days. It’s like a fuse is burning just steps behind me, reducing my lived life to ash.”

Absorbing and difficult to shake as it was, there was also something unsatisfying about the cadence of events in Bellevue Square – the breakdown, the return to normalcy, and the regression – though perhaps that’s just because it treads disconcertingly close to the rhythms of reality. I yearned for Jean’s mental fissures to mend, for her to make the full recovery that fiction enables, but instead I got an imperfect resolution. Though I guess that’s life, right?