Why In the Name of the Father is being sold as a novel is completely inexplicable. Two archetypal characters, one a Quebec nationalist, the other a federalist, appear in the early pages and again at the end, but two characters do not a novel make. This book is a polemical essay, and it should be read as such.

A Franco-Ontarian novelist, Poliquin takes on every sacred cow of Quebec nationalism and separatism, skewering, denouncing, and puncturing intellectual bubbles everywhere. The translation is good, but Poliquin’s arguments lead him to range so widely over literature and politics that only a few readers will know all the players.

That ignorance is one of the author’s main points. Just as English Canadians know little about Quebec’s authors, so, too, do the Québecois know little about English Canada’s. Neither linguistic group cares much about the other, Poliquin argues, but intelligent English Canadians occasionally feel a twinge of guilt about this. Not the Quebec nationalists, however. Poliquin cites a Montreal columnist who was proud of her indifference to Canlit, a “cultivated woman vaunting her ignorance.” Canadians must be unique in “not only refus[ing] knowledge of the Other, but also [wanting] to let him see how much we don’t want to know him so we can show him how much we don’t need him.”

How did this happen? How was it that Canada became “part of the past in many Quebec regions,” a place where only “old people breathe its name without blushing…”? Poliquin blames history and politics: the Parizeaus who hated Canada without ever knowing it, the Bourassas who turned the relationship into profitable federalism, the intellectuals who cherished a long-ago grievance when someone told their father to “speak white.” Poliquin also discusses Quebec’s historical tendency to value the collective over the individual.

This book upset the Québecois. It should disturb English Canadians too.