MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

An architect’s travails.

Award-winning Canadian novelist Lambert weaves a hypnotic narrative, smoothly translated from French by Winkler, about greed and inequality, hypocrisy, and, not least, a “dangerous notion of purity” emerging from vociferous public clamor. The novel is centered on internationally acclaimed architect Celine Wachowski, renowned for her design of New York and Tokyo skyscrapers; the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Museum; and luxury residences in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and the Hamptons, for clients including Sigourney and Meryl, Madonna and Julianne. The host of a Netflix series, Old House, New House, Celine congratulates herself on educating viewers about “architecture, design, urbanism, and the history of little-known cultures.” As the novel opens, she is overseeing the construction of a vast complex in the outskirts of her native Montreal for the headquarters of the corporate monolith WeBuy. Located on “unceded Indigenous territory,” the complex, she feels certain, will revive a decrepit area, commercially and aesthetically. She is unprepared, then, for the eruption of protests against the building and, soon, against her. A two-part New Yorker article digs deeply into her work and life, underscoring the “social cost” of her creations, which are “reserved for only a tiny segment of the population,” accusing her of exploitation, racism, and sexism. Older intellectuals sign editorials excoriating capitalist ideology; “young detractors and women who spoke up called her an abuser, she had committed symbolic rape….” Well versed in the theoretical underpinnings of social and cultural debates, Lambert skewers “the fascist old guard that is behind the current right-thinking left”; the pretensions of the conspicuously virtuous, such as Celine’s employee who carries a vegan leather bag and dresses “in an armour of European linen made 50 percent from sustainable materials”; and Celine’s slippery, self-serving transformation.

An astute critique of entrenched power.