A Minor Chorus
By Billy-Ray Belcourt
WW Norton 2022

Right at the start of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut novel A Minor Chorus, the trouble starts. Belcourt’s unnamed narrator (whose thoughts, feelings, expressions, friends, and experiences all precisely match Belcourt’s own down to the smallest verifiable detail, but since the words “a novel” are front and center on the cover, we’ll pass on to other things) is having a conversation (one assumes - the are no quotation marks) with a friend, who is “non-binary” and who’s referred to with a plural pronoun. As they’re (both the narrator and the friend, that is, not just the friend alone) discussing their (both the narrator and the friend, that is, not just the friend alone) separate projects. The narrator is at a personal and professional crossroads, feeling that he’s wasting his time pursuing his dissertation. He’s increasingly feeling “a hunger for another way of being in the world,” and he’s contemplating ditching the whole academic experience and writing a novel. 

As they’re (both the narrator and the friend, that is, not just the friend alone) talking, the narrator muses that maybe there’s not that much difference between academic writing and fiction. “I read novels all the time,” he says, “but also I don’t think theory and prose, or whatever you want to call it, are that distant … They’re streets in the same city, and sometimes they intersect.” 

If you read this with horror, fearing it portends a novel full of academic theory and jargon, you’re warranted – it does. In this same conversation, we get the line “Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” 

The narrator sees himself as an aggrieved, perpetually assaulted racial and cultural rebel, always bucking himself up. “If I admired my own abundances, my own little rebellions against subjugation,” he thinks at one point, “I could learn to be as alive as possible.” It’s difficult to live, he mentions at another point, “in a world that erodes freedom.” The narrator is a minor celebrity on campus (one of the men who visit his apartment for bought sex mentions that he’s recognizable) and beloved by his dissertation advisor, who tells him he’s brilliant. The narrator has a stipend from the school to support him while he works on his dissertation, even though he’s lately been spending all of his time having sex and binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy. We should all be so subjugated. 

But he goes to Hannah, that dissertation advisor, and pours out his heart. Absent only the quotation marks, this is represented as dialogue that any human being would actually say to any other human being:

The truth is that for a while now I’ve been weighing the decision to stay or to leave the program. I’m two years away from a defense; the thought of remaining a student with funding that is barely livable and a life that seems like a worse version of Barthes’s “solitude with regular interruptions” – because the regular interruptions have been racism and bureaucratic violence – is unbearable. And I don’t want to bear the unbearable. Sometimes I gaslight myself because from afar I’m doing something that syncs up with my intellectual goals. Despite getting started with a Ph.D with a lofty dream: to produce an academic work of cultural significance. Now I’m not sure that’s what I want anymore, nor do I believe that’s even possible.

Apart from the fact that the narrator experiences no racism and no bureaucratic violence (these things, like most of the blasting cascade of cruelties and injustices to which the narrator casually alludes, do not exist in the novel; these are references to Twitter, with which readers of this novel must be intimately familiar in order to make sense of almost any paragraph), the objection here is that people don’t talk like this – except in this book, where they scarcely talk any other way, because the author’s stand-in doesn’t see much of a difference between theory and fiction.

There’s certainly not much difference between the narrator and the white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalist bigotries he’s forever – honestly, forever – droning on about. Once he leaves campus and heads out in the rural Alberta in order to sort out what he wants to do with his creativity, the narrator splits his time almost equally between silently protesting against the offhand bigotry of every single person he encounters and practicing offhand bigotry on every single person he encounters:

As I pumped gas into my vehicle an older white man pulled up behind me in a truck with years of rust above the tires. As he jumped down, the thud of his boots made disturbed the seriousness I’d brought to the task of refueling, of lamenting the hypothetical unhappiness of of rural gay men in twenty-first century Alberta. Our gazes, similarly curious, analytical, locked, then fell away. His was a simple portrait to paint: He looked like dozens of other men of his age, race, and location, all of whom, in my mind, were as clad in faded denim as he was. Resultantly, I boxed him in a stereotype, so much so that I was momentarily worried he was going to call me a faggot or something else resonant with the fury of prejudice.

Passages like this display both the generous amounts of talent and insight that Belcourt has and also his penchant for indulging in all the usual first-novelist vices: overwriting, sententiousness, the occasional hilarious clunker of a line (“I couldn’t unsee everything my gut told me I was missing out on” being perhaps the foremost contender anywhere in the book), and the chucking-in of everything the author has ever written, under the mistaken belief that it’s all interesting. To these vices is added one from the 21st century: the preening, extremely boring entitlement of people who’ve been playing a combination of Rosa Parks and Joan of Arc for all of their adult lives on social media. Oscar Wilde said that in every first novel, the hero is the author as Christ or Faust, but in the age of Twitter, Faust is off the options list.

One of the minor annoyances of A Minor Chorus is that it almost tells an interesting story. The narrator’s childhood friend from the Cree reservation, Jack, leads a tough, defeated life actually experiencing the racism and discrimination the narrator never does. His story wouldn’t have been a simple copy-and-paste vanity exercise from the author’s own social media posts. A Minor Chorus ends with the narrator poised to write a novel. Here’s hoping it’s Jack’s story.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor.