Arlette is the perfect housewife and mother, the one whose son had the first Beatles jacket in the neighbourhood because she sewed it for him, the one whose Christmas Eve celebrations looked like the pictures in glossy women’s magazines. As François Gravel’s novel Adieu, Betty Crocker opens, Arlette has recently died and her nephew Benoît finds himself wondering about her. When he was a boy he was envious of her children, and now, as a professor of management studies, his academic interest is piqued by memories of this “perfect household manager.”

Nothing is really perfect, of course, and as Benoît muses and questions his cousins, we learn that Arlette’s home was indeed her castle, but one that she had literally barricaded herself inside. Her husband, her children, and the rest of the family – including Benoît’s mother, who talked to her every day until her own death – conspired to help Arlette do this.

Gravel has been skillfully chronicling suburban life for some time. His last novel, The Extraordinary Garden, was a wonderful tale of love, temptation, and fidelity set in the outskirts of Montreal. This time the milieu is the same – Marc-André, the previous novel’s narrator, is actually Benoît’s brother. This story is also told in the first person, mostly by Benoît, who admits he is a bit of a curmudgeon and whose observations made me laugh at loud at least twice.

But Gravel has Benoît give over parts of the narrative to his cousins’ explanations of their lives, and then ends the novel with a soliloquy from beyond the grave by Arlette herself. If we really learned why Arlette was so afraid – she says she’s just too sensitive to noise to bear the outside – the novel’s multiple voices would not have been so distracting. We didn’t, though, and so I read the last page feeling that an important element of the story was missing.

Much of Adieu, Betty Crocker is a delight, however, and Sheila Fischman has masterfully caught the rhythms and drolleries of Gravel’s style.