In 2008, at the age of fifty-one, André Alexis published his second novel. He had come rather late to the game, putting out his first collection of short stories at thirty-seven and his debut novel a few years later. But his work was well received, and that first novel, Childhood, garnered him a brace of major literary prizes. Four hundred and eighty pages long and a decade in the making, Asylum was a suitably ambitious follow-up. Exploring the intersecting lives of a cast of characters in Ottawa during the early Brian Mulroney administration, the action is driven by a bureaucratic hero peddling a scheme to build a vast prison complex, something “great and deep and noble” that would rehabilitate degenerates through its stunning beauty. Part social novel, part allegory, part parable, it was a big, serious book. It landed on shelves with a thud and sat there undisturbed. “A diet of ideas without actions,” one reviewer called it, in a phrase that sums up its reception.
The rejection of Asylum was a turning point in Alexis’s career. “The failures,” he tells me over a Zoom call in July, “are sometimes more productive than the successes, in that they lead you to places that you might not have expected.” Alexis decamped to a friend’s house in London, where he wandered the streets of Camberwell listening obsessively to Beethoven’s sixth symphony (the “Pastoral”). His mind began to turn back to the flat, fertile land between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, the Southwestern Ontario of his childhood. He settled on an idea: a young priest arrives in a small fictional town called Barrow, where his faith is tested by a series of encounters with the miraculous.
“It was one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had as a writer,” he recalls. “You are just lost in this dream for part of the time that you’re writing [the book]. You sink into it.” By the time he returned to Canada three months later, he had the first draft of the novel that would become Pastoral.
And so began one of the most unusual experiments in Canadian literature. Between 2009 and 2021, Alexis wrote five interlinked novels in five different genres, all of which dealt with philosophical questions of order and chaos. The books were not a series but a network, an arrangement of four points with a fifth in the centre: a quincunx. It was a structure he borrowed from the seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne, who believed the Garden of Eden had been laid out according to this same mystical design. By the time the last instalment of The Quincunx Cycle was published in 2021, Alexis would be one of the best selling fiction writers in Canada, having won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize, two Rogers Writers’ Trust prizes, and the top spot on Canada Reads 2017. It was an extraordinary run.
And yet the prizes, the accolades, and the steady place on the bestseller list had mostly come from the astounding popularity of a single title, the second in the cycle: Fifteen Dogs. Maybe because each book was designed to be read as a standalone novel, maybe because the quality across the series was uneven, or maybe just because high-concept philosophical novels are rarely bestsellers, the Quincunx did not generate much commentary, even in literary circles. I probably wouldn’t find this fact particularly interesting if it were any other novelist or any other series. But given the thematic preoccupations of the Quincunx, I can’t help but feel there is something ironic, almost literary, about its reception.
Here’s Alexis, a writer who, after a major career setback, constructs an elaborate schema for a cycle of novels about the relationship between order and chaos in which the characters are constantly frustrated in their desire to make sense of the world by the capricious will of cosmic forces. The second of these books ends up becoming a massive success, but it’s the least characteristic of the cycle, and when he finally publishes the final novel—the centrepiece of the whole project—it’s a bit of a flop. If André Alexis appeared as a character in an André Alexis novel, this is exactly how his career would go.
Earlier this fall, Coach House Books released a new edition of Fifteen Dogs to mark its tenth anniversary. It includes an expanded text, a foreword by the American poet Eileen Myles, and an essay by Alexis himself on the origins of the novel. Alexis says his intention had originally been to edit and rewrite sections of the whole series and publish it as a single volume, but when he set about the task, he found it was beyond him. “It felt,” he says, “like I was looking at the work of another human being.”
“Fifteen Dogs is an easy book to explain,” Myles writes in the introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition. “Two gods make a bet involving dogs, intelligence, and mortality. So it’s dogs and magic. Who does that excite? Everyone I would think. If you love a dog you probably consider them a deity.” Myles says they are constantly recommending the book to dog people, and this anecdote probably explains a decent part of the book’s commercial success: people who like dogs like reading books about dogs.
Now, I like dogs as much as the next person. But I’m often struck, when I reread the novel, by how bleak things are for the canine protagonists. Yes, the book is a beautiful exploration of love and consciousness and the gift of language. It also depicts a world rife with violence, cruelty, suffering, and grief, in which baffled isolation is the normative state for any intelligent, sensitive being. Love, so often celebrated as the thing that makes life worth living, is, in Alexis’s fiction, often just another opportunity for misunderstanding and alienation.
The story opens at the Wheat Sheaf Tavern in Toronto, where Apollo (god of poetry and truth, an embodiment of order) and Hermes (god of thieves and travellers, a trickster) get into an argument about whether human intelligence is a gift or a curse. They make a wager: they’ll grant human intelligence to fifteen dogs, and if even one of them is happy at the end of its life, Apollo will owe Hermes a year of servitude.
Most of the fifteen find their new-found intelligence bewildering. Ordinary dogs sense the difference and attack them on sight. They retreat to an isolated den in High Park. As their communication evolves from inchoate barks and howls into a proper language, tensions arise within the pack between those who want to return to their previous state and those who, like the dog-poet Prince and the thoughtful black poodle named Majnoun, embrace the new way of being. The leader of the pack, an imposing Neapolitan mastiff named Atticus, decides the language is a threat to their essential dog-ness and orchestrates a purge. Prince escapes with the aid of Hermes. Majnoun, ambushed by Atticus outside the pack’s den, only survives thanks to a human couple, Nira and Miguel, who take him in.
Atticus is now free to restore the old canine traditions. But the more strictly the dogs are policed, the more artificial their behaviour becomes. “The pack had grown very peculiar indeed: an imitation of an imitation of dogs. All that had formerly been natural was now strange. All had been turned to ritual.” Atticus starts to imagine a pure, ideal dog, with all the qualities a true dog should have. Since one of these qualities is being (a true dog couldn’t be an abstraction), Atticus simultaneously reinvents, from first principles, religion, theology, and Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument for the existence of God.
His reign is brief. The wily beagle Benjy comes to resent his own place at the bottom of the hierarchy and leads his pack mates to a garden of poisonous food and watches them die. Atticus’s devotions to the true dog have, however, attracted the attention of Zeus, father of the gods, who recognizes the mastiff as a dog after his own heart. He grants Atticus’s last vengeful wish: Benjy will die the same agonizing death as Atticus when he is abandoned in a locked house with rat poison under the sink.
Majnoun, meanwhile, has developed a connection with Nira, who realizes that he can understand what she is saying. Their friendship is one of the most affecting parts of the novel. But Majnoun will always be a dog, with a dog’s understanding of sex and violence. Nira will always be an enlightened Canadian of the twenty-first century who suspects Majnoun of hiding behind biological essentialism. When the fates intervene, cutting Nira’s life short and lengthening Majnoun’s, his love for Nira becomes a form of torture.
The only dog to die happy is Prince—the one who finds, in language, a way of loving the world for its own sake. Blind, deaf, and almost entirely immobile, he still has his words. As he lies on a veterinary table awaiting the end, one of his poems returns to him.
At that exact moment it struck him again how beautiful his language was. Certainly, if he was the last of his pack, it was sad that no creature alive knew it. But how wonderful that he—unexceptional though he had been—had been allowed to know it as deeply as he had [. . .] Somewhere, within some other being, his beautiful language existed as a possibility, perhaps as a seed. It would flower again.
Fifteen Dogs deserves its accolades. And I think the underlying bleakness—the sense that death is a precondition for meaning, “hidden in [our] languages and at the root of [our] civilizations”—is part of what readers respond to. But it is only when read in the context of The Quincunx Cycle that all its dimensions become clear.
Alexis took the design for the Quincunx from Thomas Browne’s essay “The Garden of Cyrus,” but he took the conceptual idea from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema (Theorem), in which a mysterious and possibly divine visitor arrives at the home of a bourgeois family. The visitor is a force of love and healing, but his sudden departure opens a void that plunges the family into various forms of madness.
Alexis tells me that he was inspired by the “geometric” qualities of the film—the way the bourgeois home is a kind of diagram of relationships, with the visitor disrupting, uniting, and ultimately destroying them, and the way it depicts “the intrusion of the divine, which is never called the divine.” In the Quincunx, Alexis makes the intrusion of the divine much more literal.
God, or deities, show up in Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, Ring, and Days by Moonlight. In The Hidden Keys, chance itself is a kind of deity. These intrusions play out in different ways, depending on the genre of the novel, and they don’t always lead to unhappiness. Neither is the divine straightforwardly benevolent. This is because “the divine,” in Alexis’s books, is pagan. It exists outside the revelations, doctrines, and laws of the Abrahamic faiths. In the world of the Quincunx, God is more often than not an embodiment of irony.
Take Pastoral: Christopher Pennant, a Catholic priest, witnesses two apparently miraculous events before learning they were orchestrated by one of his parishioners as a test of his character—a realization that reawakens his doubts about God’s existence. When God does appear to him in the form of a talking sheep, Pennant assumes it is another trick and tells the sheep the only miracles he needs are “the plants and animals and the sky above.” The deity accepts this, and when Pennant receives proof that the sheep wasn’t an illusion, he is incapable of believing it.
The Hidden Keys, a mystery set in a slightly unreal version of Toronto in the 2010s, is the most “realist” of the Quincunx novels. It tells the story of the noble thief Tancred Palmieri and his mission to fulfill the last wish of the troubled heiress Willow Azarian by solving a puzzle left by her father. The absence of the supernatural does not mean an absence of the weird. The novel is a semiotic mystery, and the central question is whether or not the clues Tancred is following actually point to anything. Ironically, Tancred solves the mystery and ends up fabulously wealthy despite never quite believing there was really a mystery to solve.
In Days by Moonlight, a travel story, a young man named Alfred August Homer accompanies his friend Professor Bruno on a research trip, looking for information about a reclusive poet named John Skennan. But the Southern Ontario of the novel is a nightmarish version of the real place, a Dantean landscape filled with eccentric characters, strange customs, and bizarre rituals. When Alfred and Bruno find Skennan (completely by accident), he tells them he lost his ability to write poetry after receiving an ecstatic vision in a sacred grove outside Feversham, famous among the world’s religions for being one of the places where God sleeps. Upon entering the grove himself, Alfred has a profound and disturbing encounter with the divine, one that leaves him with a gift for healing that will seriously complicate his life.
In Ring, a romance, Gwenhwyfar Lloyd falls in love with Tancred Palmieri, the thief from The Hidden Keys, now reformed and living a life of leisure. Gwenhwyfar’s mother, upon learning her daughter has finally found a man, reveals that Gwenhwyfar is part of an ancient female bloodline, keepers of a magic ring given by Aphrodite. It grants the women of this lineage the power to change three things about the men they love, at the cost of sacrificing something that is dear to them. In a book passed down the generations, Gwenhwyfar reads about her foremothers’ experiences, which chronicle the many ways getting what you want can be a nightmare.
Alexis’s characters are constantly trying to find the right model, the right heuristic, for understanding the world. The genres of the novels themselves—pastoral, apologue, romance, mystery, and travel narrative—are structures that make sense of human life, conventions that bring comfort because they are predictable. But as we discover at the end of Days by Moonlight, life isn’t exactly like novels. Alfred Homer, who has read Pastoral, meets Christopher Pennant, the priest, who is still living in Barrow. Except his name is Penn, not Pennant, and he explains that the book “wasn’t faithful to reality.” He never felt the tension between God and nature depicted in the novel; he understands religion as “a kind of language we use to express our sense of mystery.”
The joke at the heart of the Quincunx is that there is a metaphysical order. But it’s beyond our capacity to understand, and it has nothing to do with justice or fairness. Gods walk the streets of Toronto, dispensing gifts. You might be better off if they don’t notice you.
“If I have a home, it is in Trinidad, circa 1957. But that place ceased to be, decades ago,” Alexis writes, about the year and place he was born, in “An Elegy,” the short autobiographical piece that closes out Other Worlds, his first post-Quincunx collection of stories, published in May.
When he was still an infant, Alexis’s parents moved to Ottawa so his father could enrol in medical school. He and his sister were left with their grandparents, Hilda and Rudolph, and great-grandmother Ada Homer. At the beginning of “An Elegy,” Alexis describes the moment he discovered the power of words to alienate.
“I had not realized I was speaking a language until Hilda and Ada began to speak to each other in a different one, patois,” he writes. It was with Ada that he felt most loved, and “the shock of being suddenly unable to understand her—like finding the door to your own room locked—was sharp enough to make me wonder about the sounds I was hearing.”
Other shocks would come. He joined his parents in Ottawa in 1961, and had another fraught encounter with language when he was enrolled in a French-language school as a six-year-old. When his father’s work took the family to Petrolia, a small town in Lambton County at the tip of Southwestern Ontario, he had to adjust yet again. Alexis’s early life was a series of dislocations, and then, at twenty-eight, another dislocation: the departure of his Catholic faith, a loss of God so profound it made him, for a period of time, suicidal. Literature has been a way of reckoning with each of these wounds.
“At the heart of my work is the experience of emigration and exile,” he tells me in an email. “These have deep emotional consequence for me. They have left scars and, to a large extent, the intellectual mechanism behind my work exists to make the emotional states manageable.”
There is a tendency, when talking about the private pain of serious artists, to imagine that their agony is somehow vindicated by their ability to turn it into something beautiful. Perhaps this narrative of redemption is appropriate for some writers. But despite the obvious joy Alexis takes in literature, the sense of loss in his work is deep and insistent. After Alfred Homer encounters God in Days by Moonlight, he has a mystical vision in which “the boundary between Alfred Homer and the world was erased [. . .] a blissful fading away of myself.” Later, while gazing at the stars over Feversham, he wrestles with the vision’s meaning.
[. . .] it occurred to me [. . .] that there is beauty because God or the universe or my own psyche is merciful, that beauty is compensation for the oneness I remembered but could no longer feel.
Not much compensation, though.
Not enough.
The Quincunx Cycle was published during a period of intense idealism, when many people believed a proper reckoning with the past would open up the possibility for a better future. I still believe that, against all the evidence. But maybe I’m drawn to Alexis’s work because my faith is weak. Most everyone in the Quincunx has an orderly mind and intentions that are morally neutral at the least, and yet their actions regularly result in chaos and cruelty. The world of Alexis’s fiction is one in which Apollo, the god of poetry, ends up tormenting the dog-poet Prince because he wants to win a bet. If there is a literary mode that governs these lives, it’s not comedy or tragedy: it’s the joke.
What is a joke? A kind of storytelling that uses language against itself, that draws attention to the fact that words aren’t just a vehicle for understanding but for misunderstanding. If you get the joke, the misunderstanding is temporary, and your pleasure is heightened by the fact that somebody else—maybe a character in the joke, maybe a character implied by it—is still wandering around, clueless. This person is called the butt of the joke, and they inhabit a cruel and baffling world where nothing makes sense and everyone else is laughing for some reason. We sympathize with these characters because sometimes we are them; we laugh because this time we’re not. Jokes really are one of the crueller literary forms.
Comedies and tragedies build toward a final resolution, but the Quincunx has no denouement. Instead, it has a series of punchlines, moments where the fullness of a certain irony, a certain misunderstanding, is revealed. Sometimes these punchlines are played for laughs (Alexis’s novels can be extremely funny, though the humour is as dry as the Rubʿ al-Khali), but often they’re stripped down to their existential stakes. Alexis’s characters are always struggling to get in on the joke, only to discover when they do that the insight provides no real safety. Gwenhwyfar Lloyd, for example, uses the power of the titular ring to ensure that when she asks Tancred to tell her what he really thinks, he will. The novel has a happy ending, but readers know this enforced honesty means Gwenhwyfar will probably, at some point, find out Tancred is a killer—and thanks to another of her wishes, she will have to love him for who he is.
True to its pagan gods, the world of the Quincunx is governed by fate—not in the sense that each character has an unshakeable destiny (Gwenhwyfar can choose not to use the ring), but in the sense that they cannot undo what has been done to them, or escape who they are as a consequence. Acceptance of this fact, and trying to live well regardless, is the main difference between the wise characters and the foolish ones.
The centrality of “jokes” to the Quincunx might help explain why literary Canada has struggled to make sense of the project as a whole. As much as one can generalize about such things, our national culture prizes earnestness and legibility and worships at the altar of improvement. Our history may be full of instances where “improvement” has gone disastrously wrong, but we tend to view each new failure as proof that we must roll up our sleeves and try harder. When we encounter yet another horrific instance of our inability to get it right, the only acceptable response is what Alfred in Days by Moonlight calls “that particularly Canadian thing: passion brought on by outrage.” This is not a culture that can be anything but suspicious of jokes, those effervescent reminders that life is absurd, cruelty is latent in every act, and language distorts whatever it describes. We do not like to contemplate the possibility that a fanatical commitment to goodness and rationality can easily produce the opposite.
The kind of optimistic moralism I’m describing here has always been an essential part of our culture. It was Alexis’s bad luck that his magnum opus came out during a period of heightened outrage; in the cultural world of the 2010s, all this business of gods and irony and fate and consolation carried a whiff of heresy for progressives and reactionaries both. If we were unable to see the profound, and in some sense liberatory, element in Alexis’s sense of humour, maybe the joke is on us.
“I feel like a lot of my work is the creation of an environment that will force the reader to be an immigrant, that will force the reader to try to interpret symbols and signs,” he tells me. “I think the root of that is that I’m an immigrant . . . you come and you see the difference between Canada and Trinidad, and you are constantly interpreting what it is that you’re seeing in Canada, and trying to fit into the place and trying to figure out if there’s some sort of deep significant structure to this thing, this entity called Canada.”
A sense of confusion, alienation, and loss suffuses the Quincunx, but as an artist, Alexis does not try to make this suffering immediately explicable in political or sociological terms. Instead, he asks readers to experience for themselves the bafflement his characters face in their encounters with a cosmic order indifferent to their needs and desires. This is a big thing to ask, of course, and perhaps it’s not surprising the Quincunx failed to cohere as a literary event. Perhaps it’s even less surprising that the one book to achieve unquestionable success transposed these difficult questions into the minds of super-intelligent dogs. No one expects a poodle to have a digestible take on identity politics.
If you think about it, the fact that one of the most ambitious literary experiments of the decade, deeply rooted in Canadian places and characters both urban and rural and yet steeped in art and philosophy from around the world, written by a man born in Trinidad, raised in Petrolia and Ottawa, and fluent in both official languages, seems to have left such a negligible mark on our literary culture—it’s pretty funny, right?
But perhaps the joke is also on Alexis.
The Quincunx is, as I said at the beginning of the essay, an uneven and occasionally frustrating work. Some of the novels are much better than others. That is because the structure he has laid out for himself—five different novels in five different genres—forces him well out of his comfort zone as a stylist. The novelist Madeleine Thien once described reading Alexis’s work as akin to “walking on ice”—everything in his books happens “matter-of-factly and without fuss,” and yet the further you go, the more aware you become of the abyss beneath your feet. His prose is understated, even flat, but it slowly pulls back the curtain to reveal the uncanniness of ordinary things.
It doesn’t always work. Alexis is at his best when describing events in a dispassionate, almost neutral tone; his prose tends to be weaker in dialogue-heavy scenes. In The Hidden Keys, the propulsive plot and the sense of mystery make up for this somewhat, but there are long stretches of Ring where characters do little more than drink various teas while saying things like, “I’m only ever on Roncy to see Alex. You know he’s on Glendale now, don’t you?” This is especially problematic because Ring is supposed to be the linchpin that holds the structure of the series together, and it is by far the weakest novel.
For a long time, I struggled to make sense of this aspect of his work. Alexis’s best fiction—Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, Days by Moonlight, and a good number of the stories collected in The Night Piece and his new book, Other Worlds—is some of the most astonishing English-language fiction of the past thirty years. And yet it’s hard to describe what makes it so affecting: he’s not a virtuoso or a show-off, it’s not easy to find a pull quote. The unadorned prose just accumulates quietly, like groundwater rising in a cellar, until you turn a page, the light flicks on, and you’re confronted by a truth that is quiet and dark and devastating. There is a sense of lingering unease in even the most normal descriptions. And then you get passages like the ones in Ring, or parts of The Hidden Keys, that feel like a bad parody of a much younger writer. It’s nothing so simple as a decline: after The Hidden Keys came Days by Moonlight, and after Ring came Other Worlds, an absolute tour de force. What’s going on?
I think the answer goes beyond the truism that writers have good days and bad days. I think there’s a joke, here, and to explain it, I need to tell you something about A, the short novella Alexis published the year before Pastoral. It tells the story of a minor literary critic named Alexander Baddeley, who is obsessed with a reclusive poet named Avery Andrews. When Baddeley asks Andrews where the poems come from, Andrews takes him to a mysterious room in Toronto Western Hospital. The room exists outside of conventional space and has a single inhabitant: God. Andrews’s poems are divinely inspired, but decades of visions have taken their toll. When Andrews eventually dies, Baddeley takes his place at God’s side, becoming a celebrated novelist. But he can’t enjoy his success: the visions are brutal, the comedown is even worse, and yet he can’t write without them. For eight years, he gives up creative pursuits. And when he returns to the hospital, hoping to try again, God is nowhere to be found.
A is a parable about creativity. Anyone can become a competent writer if they put the time in, but inspiration exists beyond reason or expertise; it’s a gift, something the artist can only accept or reject. They do not master their material, they surrender to it (Andrews wanted to be a novelist, for example, but was given poetry; Baddeley wanted to be a poet but was given novels). As soon as an artist starts trying to make their work conform to their idea of what it should be, they’re lost.
I cannot help but read the Quincunx through A, the occluded sixth point, the map into the garden. When I do, I see a wonderful, transcendent irony: the great flaw in the Quincunx is that Alexis has tried to make his inspiration and style adhere to the structure of his design, but he cannot control his inspiration any more than the rest of us can. I mean, why was Alexis, this supremely unsettled and unsettling writer, writing a romance, a mystery—genres that seek closure and completion? He was, I imagine, trying to construct something balanced and geometric, something that celebrated the comic parts of life as well as the tragic. But his gift is as particular as his fate: to describe mystery rather than revelation, doubt rather than certainty, consolation rather than happiness. His flawed masterpiece embodies the irony it so carefully describes.
Perhaps this is why I love the Quincunx: it’s a magnificent failure. Literature should not be perfect, because perfection, in this world, is always a kind of lie. As the Quincunx recedes into our literary history, maybe we’ll be able to better appreciate its crooked hallways and leaning towers. As for Alexis, he has moved on. The stories in Other Worlds are weird and beautiful, blending Trinidad and Southern Ontario in ways that are novel for him, in writing that is as lean and tight as any joke. They are a return to the sources of his inspiration, playful and discomfiting and funny—looser than the Quincunx, less architectural. But they are pitched in a familiar key. The penultimate story is called “Consolation.” The last line of the collection, coming at the end of “An Elegy,” is this: “I have found a home in my own language, and to some extent, I dislike it.”
