At a lavish 60th birthday party for a wealthy Montreal socialite, all eyes are on Céline Wachowski. Céline, the protagonist of Canadian writer Kev Lambert’s prizewinning novel May Our Joy Endure, is a celebrated architect whose buildings have “altered the skyline of San Francisco and made its subtle contribution to those of New York and Bangkok”. Among her most prestigious projects are the Decco Tower in New York, the media centre for the London Olympics and the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Museum. Outside the public sphere, she has designed houses for Paul McCartney, Julianne Moore, Madonna, David Hockney and Isabelle Huppert.
Lambert paints his fictional architect as a cross between Zaha Hadid, Susan Sontag and Prue Leith, with a reach far beyond her profession: she is host of a popular Netflix show and author of several books. She even presented a 2018 Golden Globe award, telling a joke that left Meryl Streep and Robert Downey Jr holding their sides. Forbes magazine placed her 203rd in its list of international billionaires.
Architecture, however, remains her prime concern and the focus of Lambert’s novel. Its most compelling passages explore her signature style and commitment to respecting the social and material history of a site. She regards architecture as the most accessible and democratic form of artistic expression, while acknowledging that it is also the most costly and dependent on political approval. Many people perceive it as “an ingrained form of capitalism”.
Lambert lambasts multinational business practices and May Our Joy Endure is a powerful attack on a super-rich milieu where burrata is flown in on a private plane from Puglia to Montreal, but it is hard to discern any deeper purpose. Like Céline herself — who believes both in “restoring and repurposing buildings” and that it is “essential to put cities to the flame and sword every fifteen years”; who gives an interview to Oprah Winfrey about the need to halt climate change while flying two friends on her private jet from Montreal to California — the novel lacks a coherent point of view.
Although written in the third person, it switches between several perspectives, predominantly that of Céline herself but also those of her associate Pierre-Moïse, her assistant, Gabriela, and a hyperbolic partygoer, who regards Céline as “a goddess” and whose use of the first-person plural is presumably intended to embrace the reader when he declares with no apparent irony that “if we had to choose between Céline and life, we would choose Céline”.
The transitions between the perspectives are clumsy, leading to frequent confusion between the author and his characters. This is at its most acute when Céline wins a commission to design the Montreal headquarters of Webuy, a massive multinational tech company. This is her first major undertaking in her hometown after 40 years of its neglect. It is never clear whether the bilious attacks on both Montreal and the “sick and degenerate” Quebec, a place of “abject stupidity and ignominy”, should be attributed to Céline or Lambert.
The Webuy Complex is being built in a disused marshalling yard and, according to its supporters, it will revive a rundown neighbourhood. According to its critics, it will be less regeneration than gentrification. Their concerns are lent credence when a former restaurateur, whose business collapsed after a huge rise in rents, commits suicide; then a hostile New Yorker article questions Céline’s commitment to ethical architecture and her links to exploitative corporations. Her world unravels with surprising rapidity. Once a trailblazer in a male-dominated profession, she is now accused of “symbolic rape”. She is voted out of the company that she herself founded, while friends and associates abandon her.
For all its Proustian references, May Our Joy Endure falls far short of ambitions. Its prose, translated from French by Donald Winkler, is at once prolix and dense. Céline laments that architects are “the victims of a serious shortfall in societal recognition”. It is certainly true that, with rare exceptions, such as Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, Graham Greene’s Querry and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, they feature far less frequently in fiction than artists, composers and novelists themselves. Sadly, Céline is not destined to redress the balance.
May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert translated by Donald Winkler Pushkin Press £18.99, 320 pages
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