In his new short story collection, André Alexis summons the avatars of his parents, and himself

Globe and Mail

16-05-2025

When I tell him I found his new book of short stories, Other Worlds, wistful as well as witty, André Alexis isn't surprised. The collection was written after the loss of his mother and father, so 'the avatars of the parents are really strong in it,' he says.
'Loss' is in a manner of speaking. Alexis's father died in 2019. His mother, who read early drafts of his work and helped edit his first novel, Childhood (she even, at his recommendation, read the Beckett trilogy: 'not something that moms generally do') is alive but afflicted with dementia. She doesn't always recognize her son and can no longer read.
At 68, Alexis says death and mortality are never far from his mind. (When we spoke, he was in London, England, where he'd flown the previous day to say goodbye to a close friend who was about to enter hospice.) He casually surmises that he has one or two novels left in him, though he wouldn't rule out short stories.
And yet Alexis's youthful appearance, the vigour and ease with which he talks about his passion – literature – and the fact that, over the past decade, he's produced a book almost every year, all suggest he might be selling himself a little short.
Other Worlds continues, on a smaller scale, the genre experiments that Alexis embarked on in his Quincunx cycle: the five novels – published between 2014 and 2019 – that include Pastoral, Fifteen Dogs, Ring, The Hidden Keys and Days by Moonlight­.
Writing the stories in Other Worlds, he says, was as a means of grasping not just his birth parents but his literary parents: a global crew that includes the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata, the Polish writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz, the Chinese classical short-story writer Pu Songling and the Italian literary eccentric Tommaso Landolfi.
You'd think that approach would result in a stylistic crazy quilt. But the parent-child relationships – and accompanying themes of revenge, innocence and alienation – that run through Other Worlds give it a satisfying sense of cohesion, to the degree that several of the stories feel interlinked.
The first one Alexis wrote, Houyhnhnm, about a man who becomes enraptured with his late physician father's horse after discovering the latter can talk (the unpronounceable title is from Jonathan Swift), was published in The New Yorker in 2022 – the first of Alexis's stories to be picked up by the magazine.
Two years later, The New Yorker also published Consolation, whose Trinidadian immigrant narrator shares a number of biographical similarities with Alexis, including a father who's a doctor and a mother with dementia.
And though Winter, in Palgrave, a beguilingly strange tale about a writer who finds himself unwitting caretaker to a town's unfriendly residents, who 'hibernate' in winter by hanging in sacks from their homes' rafters, isn't explicitly about parents, Alexis points to the symbolism of its setting: 'Winter is the maternal space, isn't it? Where it's just care, care for things in the womb.'
Alexis's professed love of Jane Austen, meanwhile, is apparent in The Bridle Path, a comedy of manners involving a lawyer who, having adopted his Trinidadian immigrant father's socially striving ways, nabs a coveted dinner invitation at the home of a couple from the wealthy Toronto enclave who may or may not be eating the help.
Asked, on this major Austen anniversary year, what his favourite novels are, Alexis doesn't hesitate: Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey – the latter because of its playfulness and mockery of Gothic fiction. 'It shows you she's not just writing stories. She's thinking about what literature is. How amusing its effects can be. She has written that one in a comedic mode. But it could just as easily be tragic. She's not some naive person that just happened to write good sentences. She's extraordinarily aware of what's going on.'
Other Worlds ends with An Elegy, a brief personal essay – inspired by Walter Benjamin's The Art of Storytelling – in which Alexis lays out his literary M.O. His love of genre, he explains, comes from his 'immigrant self,' which he also considers his most creative self. Mastering the rules and conventions of a new genre, and the fear that process engenders, feels, Alexis writes, like 'a kind of emigration.'
The essay also sheds retrospective light on the book's opening story, Contrition, an isekai (a traditional Japanese folktale, huge in manga, usually involving a character being transported through time into a parallel world) about an elderly Trinidadian healer who, after he dies at the hands of British soldiers in 1857, is reborn a century later in the body of a boy named Paul who lives in Petrolia, Ont.
Turns out (per An Elegy), that when he was a child living in Petrolia – and his race and French name marked him as different – Alexis went by 'Paul' for about a year, until his parents discovered the name change and put the kibosh on it. He writes that he still 'resents' his birth name.
A foray into psychoanalysis convinced Alexis that his brief incarnation as Paul had a deeper motivation, one related to the central trauma of his childhood. From infancy to the age of 4, he'd been left in the care of Trinidadian relatives after his parents went to Canada. When he saw them again, half his short life had passed, and his parents were effectively strangers. 'André was the name of the boy who was left behind. If I was Paul, perhaps there was a chance that I wouldn't be abandoned. That I would be okay,' he says.
Alexis's next project is a rewriting of the entire Quincunx cycle. His principal aim is to correct some chronological and logistical errors, but he also wants to revise parts of Fifteen Dogs – the novel that won him a hat trick of big Canadian awards (the Giller, Writer's Trust, Canada Reads) and that was adapted to the stage in 2023 (the show was revived early this year by Mirvish Productions in Toronto and will be mounted at Ottawa's National Arts Centre this fall). In October, the book's publisher, Coach House Books, will commemorate its 10th anniversary with a special hardcover edition.
Alexis wants to add 'a little something, at most a page' to Rosie, a character from Fifteen Dogs that was important to him, and to whom he feels he gave short shrift, perspective-wise.
I ask if altering finished work like that isn't considered verboten. Akin to George Lucas's controversial reworking of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Alexis counters with the example of another of his favourite authors, Henry James, who rewrote, often extensively, 24 of his novels, which he republished in a collection known as 'the New York Edition.'
'And they're all worse!' Alexis says with a laugh. 'Because they're written in his later style. So you've got to be really aware of what you're doing.'