Adolescence in Quebec

THE TOWN BELOW (302 pp.)--Roger Lemelin, translated by Samuel Putnam--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

In Quebec's picturesque Lower Town lies the district of St. Sauveur, a ragged slum in which French Canadians cling to "a mode of life tenaciously wedded to the past and resistant to all progress, obstinately refusing any kind of change for the reason that all change was brought about by outsiders." Unlike the rest of Quebec City's picture-postcard prettiness, St. Sauveur is a wretched place: its proletarian "mulots" are ignorant and desperately poor, its bourgeois "soyeux" (silken ones) often bigoted and pretentious.

Roger Lemelin, himself the son of a mulot, has drawn, in The Town Below, a thickly atmospheric portrait of St. Sauveur. He wrote it on the family kitchen table, while his numerous brothers & sisters did their homework on the other end. Lemelin loves the vivid, sharp-tongued mulots but at times he is overcome with despair over their backwardness and superstitions.

The central characters of this meandering story about an adolescent love affair, mercurial Denis and marshmallow-sweet Lise, are difficult to take seriously as human beings. But Lemelin writes with vigor and energy, he is rooted in the life of the people about whom he writes and knows exactly what he is talking about; and, most important of all, he is steadfastly honest. Roger Lemelin may yet write novels that will make not only French Canada but the entire western world acknowledge him as an important writer.

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