One of the most interesting authors to emerge from Quebec in recent years, Monique Proulx writes for radio, television, and films in addition to her award-winning fiction. She won two literary prizes for her 1983 debut collection of short stories, four for her 1993 novel Invisible Man at the Window, and took a prize for her own screen adaptation of her first novel, Le Sexe des étoiles, originally published in 1987. (The film itself was greeted with much acclaim.) Like Invisible Man in 1994, Sex of the Stars has now been ably translated by novelist Matt Cohen. At press time, Proulx’s newest book, a collection of short stories entitled Les Aurores Montréales, had just been released and was already on Montreal bestseller lists.

A wry satirical novel of ideas about sexual identity and mores, Sex of the Stars revolves around four main characters: a man, a woman, a child, and the child’s father, a transsexual. Not so long ago, Marie-Pierre Deslauriers was a brilliant – and male – microbiologist with a CV that would be the envy of any scientist. Now she is a curvaceous and statuesque female whose sexuality challenges and disturbs all those whose paths cross hers. Along with having to live with the logistical and emotional fallout of her sex change, Marie-Pierre inhabits a bureaucratic nightmare as the powers-that-be balk at accepting her new persona. “Yet she was the same person … inside she had stayed exactly the same.”

Marie-Pierre’s impact on others drives the book’s plot. She effectively unclogs the blocked novelist Dominique Larue (and gets his sexual batteries going, too, after a long dry spell). She provokes Gaby, researcher for the “Not So Crazy” radio talk show, a self-conscious New Woman (“when she [meets] a man for the first time she [looks] at him right where it counts, between the legs”), to make fresh departures in her life. And she frustrates and exasperates the brilliant young girl, Camille, a budding genius with an obsession for astronomy, whom Marie-Pierre, in an earlier incarnation, had fathered.

Of these main characters and a host of subsidiary ones who orbit around them, only Camille and Dominique’s cantankerous old father are fully believable. The others are puppets, manipulated by the author to drive home a message as the novel romps to a facile conclusion. Marie-Pierre delivers this message when she speaks of the world of mainstream heterosexuals: “You’re all the same. Male and female twined together inside but you deny that, you always struggle to stay faithful to your façade.”

What’s noteworthy about this book is how at home Proulx is with the world of science and how organically she incorporates Camille’s fascination with the stars into her text. This passion for astronomy adds a touch of the metaphysical to the exploration of sexual “otherness,” contributing depth to a novel more original than substantial, more intriguing than truly satisfying.