In Pursuit of Revenge

Review of Chenneville (HarperCollins/Wm Morrow, 2023), by Paulette Jiles
Reviewed by Debra Martens

Governor-General award winning poet (for Celestial Navigation in 1985), memoirist (Cousins, 1992) and novelist, Missouri-born Paulette Jiles writes about the American Civil War from her home in Texas. Or more precisely, about war’s aftermath. Her latest novel, Chenneville (Harper Collins/William Morrow, 2023), begins in 1865, after the war but in a military hospital. Then there is Simon the Fiddler (2020), also starting as the war ends. News of the World (2016), a National Book Award finalist and now a film, similarly involves a quest in the war’s aftermath. Enemy Women (2001) takes place during and after the Civil War.

So why, you might ask, am I reviewing Chenneville by an author who seems more American than a Canadian writer abroad?

The simple reason is that Paulette Jiles has dual citizenship, having lived in Canada for over twenty years, published books of poetry here, and worked for the CBC in northern Ontario with Indigenous communities (about which she published North Spirit: Travels Among the Cree and Ojibway Nations and Their Star Maps in 1995). The real reason, however, is that I loved her 1986 novel, Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola (Polestar Press, 1986), a short poetic book about a train trip across Canada. (Her book makes me nostalgic for the old CPR train across Canada, when there were red caps to help you with your luggage.) Reading Karma-Kola is like being a kid at a party, spinning in excitement and then collapsing in exhaustion — and so you put the book aside for a bit. Have a look at these zingers: “American money is narrow and long like Virginia Woolf’s feet.” Or “She’s finding it easier to depart and effect closure, to become impermeable, like a trench coat…” Or “The Vancouver train station is a construction of 1890 dignities and recent decorative blunders.” This confident pithiness, this voice that elicits a guffaw, is entirely missing from Chenneville.

Reading Chenneville is like being at an adult party, where a soothing narrative carries the dinner conversation and you await the end of the story but oops your eyes droop — and the book drops to the floor. Chenneville is not Karma-Kola’s mash-up of detective and romance novels, but a tale about a man – Jean-Louise Chenneville – who suffers serious losses and sets out to redeem them, choosing a path of revenge. Let me emphasize that Chenneville is not boring, but there is no adrenalin rush, no excitement of the new, rather a settling into a comfortable story that unfolds as a journey. (A favourite motif for Jiles.) I know it is not fair of me to compare a writer’s work now to her work nearly 40 years ago, particulary since Karma-Kola was playful whereas Chenneville is written masterfully, with details laid out in exactly the right place, with dialogue cutting the description at exactly the right moment.

“Bobolinks rode the telegraph wires and greeted the May mornings with cascades of wild notes, but even so, even so, John found himself weighted with a deep and acid anger that Lalie was not here to see the hayfields turn a green like watered silk.”

–Paulette Jiles, Chenneville, HarperCollins ARC pp. 58-59.

Who is Jean-Louis Chenneville? For me, the best part of the novel is when he himself is discovering this, as his memory comes back to him after a terrible head injury. I was fascinated by which parts of his life slide back into his consciousness, how and when. Once he hits the road in pursuit of his sister’s killer, adventuring his way through a landscape damaged by war, his wobbly identity becomes a metaphor for war’s aftermath — an entire country putting itself back together. Except for one huge difference: only Chenneville seeks revenge for wartime murder — the others seek peace and prosperity. His desire for revenge compounds his losses (he will sell his family estate, he will never again see the man who educated him, or his mother, gone mute in grief), and it is only when a plot twist forces him to relinquish his original plan that he begins to take the steps that will improve his life. A plot twist, I might add, that links this novel to Simon the Fiddler.

I’ve been struggling with the question: what is historical fiction? Is it literary fiction set in the past or is it a genre unto itself? This novel is by no means the first historical novel reviewed by Canadian Writers Abroad (The Sisters Brothers, Eva Solomon’s War, Washington Black, Matrons and Madams, among others), but it is the first to make me wonder if this is one of a genre. Is it because Chenneville, once he is fit enough to travel, hardly develops as a character? Or that the novel so obviously fits Perry Anderson’s definition in his essay on the historical novel of “lives reshaped by sweeping social forces,” because Chenneville’s life is overturned not only by his war experience but also by the wartime murder of his sister and her family. Although Anderson concludes that pretty much anything goes in today’s rise of the historical novel, I think there is still a case to be made that historical novels, like the study of the past, should make some comment on the present. What can a novel about the aftermath of the American Civil War, and murder, and the desire for revenge, have to say about today? Sidestepping the obvious (that Capitol Hill thing in January 2021, which hinted revolution was around the corner; some vengeful threats made during Covid to people trying to save the lives of others), I land on the telegraph, and one of Chenneville’s first retrieved memories, going up in a balloon. Did I not mention that Chenneville was a military telegraph operator, and that while thus employed he went up in a balloon, and that he falls in love with a telegraph operator? These modern innovations stand out in contrast to the filthy murderous repetition of war and its devastations. Technology is the positive theme in the novel Chenneville, technology is even the love story, and one can imagine that the likes of Elon Musk and his sparring partner Mark Zuckerberg would enjoy reading Chenneville.

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• Perry Anderson, “From Progress to Catastrophe: Perry Anderson on the Historical Novel,” London Review of Books, 28 July 2011.
• HarperCollins sample of Chenneville.
• Douglas Barbour’s Canadian Encyclopedia entry offers more details about Paulette Jiles’s years in Canada.
• Enemy Women won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2002; source CBC.
• News of the World was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2016; see trailers for the film adaptation here.
• “I love Paulette Jiles’s Novels. So Why Won’t She Talk to Me?” A fun profile of Jiles by Emily McCullar, May 2020, Texas Monthly online.
• Kirkus Review lists all of the books by Paulette Jiles with publication dates.
• CBC list of recent historical fiction.
• You can buy Karma Cola now, but I’m not sure the beverage was available in 1986, when Sitting in the Club Car was published. Nor in 1980, when Gita Mehta published Karma Kola (Jonathan Cape; Minerva paperback).