The Second Substance

A community of outsiders squats in an abandoned rural gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer, and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go - a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is "not a sideline" but the motive force in a story she is struggling to understand. Neighbours grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of "normal life" and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization. Arriving from deep in left field, Anne Lardeux's debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel of self-actualization and resistance. Often funny, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature.