Last Night in Montreal

Last Night in Montreal Review

Last Night in Montreal begins with a woman leaving: Lilia Albert walks out of the Brooklyn apartment she shares with Eli, a linguistics graduate student, taking nothing and going nowhere that Eli can find. He begins to follow. The novel unfolds in the space between his pursuit and her history — a history of disappearances, of a childhood spent being moved from city to city by a father who had taken her from her mother, of languages accumulated the way other children accumulate addresses, of a detective who has been following Lilia’s trail for years.

Mandel’s debut, published in 2009 when she was twenty-nine, is recognisably the work of the writer who would produce Station Eleven five years later. The braided timelines, the structural interest in what it means to reconstruct a person from the evidence they leave behind, the precision of the prose — all of it is present, if not yet at full stretch. What is notably absent is the warmth that makes Station Eleven consoling: Last Night in Montreal is a cooler, darker book, more interested in the damage that people do to each other than in the ways they sustain each other.

Lilia herself is the novel’s most formally interesting element. She is constructed entirely from the outside — from Eli’s bewilderment, from the detective’s files, from the memories of people she has left behind in cities across North America. The reader never fully enters her interiority, which is the point: some people make themselves unknowable as a survival strategy, and Mandel is disciplined enough to maintain the opacity throughout. The result is a mystery that has the shape of a psychological novel without ever quite becoming one.

The novel’s real subject is the people left behind — Eli, but also Lilia’s mother, the detective, the various people in various cities who thought they knew her — and the specific quality of grief that attaches to someone who has not died but has simply chosen not to be found. Last Night in Montreal is not the best of Mandel’s novels, but it is a remarkably assured debut, and readers who discover her through Station Eleven or The Glass Hotel and return to it will find the characteristic intelligence already fully formed, asking the questions that will sustain an entire career.

Lilia as Formal Problem

The decision to construct Lilia entirely from the outside — from other people’s perceptions of her, from the detective’s files, from Eli’s bewilderment, from the accounts of people she has left behind in cities across the continent — is the novel’s most significant formal commitment. Mandel holds to it throughout. We are never given Lilia’s interiority directly. We are never permitted to see from inside the consciousness of the woman everyone is looking for.

This creates a specific reading experience: the mystery of Lilia is never resolved, not because the novel withholds information, but because Lilia’s unknowability is the point. Some people make themselves opaque as a survival strategy. A childhood spent being moved from city to city, languages accumulated while identities were shed, the skills of reinvention learned before the capacity for stable selfhood was established — these are the conditions that produce someone who cannot be fully known because she has never been fully stable enough to know. The novel’s formal opacity is its psychological argument.

Language and Identity

Lilia speaks multiple languages — French, English, and others accumulated in transit. The novel’s treatment of her linguistic facility is closely tied to its treatment of identity. Languages are not simply communicative tools in Last Night in Montreal; they are identities that can be adopted, worn, and left behind. Lilia’s ability to move between them is the same ability that allows her to move between cities and lives. Eli, a linguistics graduate student, is drawn to her partly because she embodies the questions his academic work addresses: what is the relationship between language and the self? What persists across translation?

The French-Canadian dimension of the novel — Lilia’s Quebec origins, the French-speaking world she is partly fleeing toward and partly fleeing from — gives this question a specific cultural weight. The linguistic tension between English and French Canada, between the identity encoded in a language and the identity available in another, is one of the novel’s most precisely drawn elements, even if it operates at the level of background pressure rather than explicit theme.

The People Left Behind

The novel’s most emotionally intelligent move is its equal attention to the people Lilia has left. Eli is the most present of these, but there is also Lilia’s mother — the woman from whom she was taken as a child and who has spent years not looking, out of a grief that has hardened into something like acceptance — and the detective who has been following Lilia’s trail out of a sense of professional obligation that has become something more personal over the years. Each of these people has been damaged by their proximity to Lilia, and the novel is careful to distribute the moral weight evenly. Lilia is not a villain. The father who took her is not purely villainous. The detective is not purely heroic. Everyone in the novel is managing a specific set of consequences from a specific set of decisions, and Mandel refuses to rank the suffering.

This refusal is characteristic. Last Night in Montreal was the first novel in which Mandel demonstrated the moral even-handedness that would become her signature — the unwillingness to organize her fiction around a simple moral hierarchy of heroes and victims. It is already fully present in this debut, which is one of the things that makes the novel so striking as a first book.

Starting Points

Readers new to Mandel sometimes ask whether to start with Last Night in Montreal or with Station Eleven. The honest answer is that Station Eleven is the richer and more emotionally open novel, and it is where most readers encounter her. But Last Night in Montreal rewards reading both before and after Station Eleven: before, because it establishes the themes and methods in their earliest form; after, because seeing those themes stripped down to their skeleton makes clearer how much has been added to them over the course of a career. The debut is a genuinely accomplished novel, not merely an apprentice work.