How to die? By heart attack? By aneurysm? Going gently in the night has traditionally been the first choice of many, but recently when I’ve posed the question I’ve heard people choose very active deaths for themselves, things like parachute failure or an abnormally mighty orgasm. That’s all fine when someone is choosing their own death, but the tone changes drastically if you ask someone about the death of their parents. What is the best way to see them die?

Gil Courtemanche’s second novel tells the story of a man coming to terms with his father just as he is reaching the end of his life. André has never loved his father, and in this short novel Courtemanche finds time to unearth each of the barbed humiliations of André’s childhood. Most concern fishing, though father was also a tyrant in the home, a malignant spot at the dinner table, and an embarrassment at the grocer’s, where he would pad down the aisle each weekend in unsuitably casual clothes.

Now it’s Christmas, decades later. The son is 60 years old, and the tyrant-father has been transformed into a nearly mute, dribbling stroke victim whose dietary regimen has become the most passionately discussed subject during gatherings of his large, Catholic family. Its members are split into two camps – the Medicals and the Buddhists – that battle out every decision. Each camp has a different idea of how father should be eased toward his death. The shorthand? It’s bean salad vs duck confit; painful observance of life vs full, artery-choking participation. André falls into the Buddhist camp, but he begins to conspire with a young nephew while playing Ping-Pong downstairs. Perhaps they should take a more active role in the old man’s death?

In his previous book, the stunningA Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, Courtemanche turned to Rwanda to find a setting for his conflict. With this work, he only has to travel as far as the dining table, which may have fewer hills and bloodstains, but is just as imaginatively rich and fierce.

The main problem some will have with this book is the same reason I believe it’s so successful. It is pared down and unflinching. Subplots do not exist, and André’s other siblings and their partners are kept intentionally flat and referred to only by their occupations – the Homeopath, the Banker, the Geographer. Courtemanche is unwilling to go down the road of the family drama à la Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Instead, the book becomes a full portrait of an awful man – one can almost hear the film rights peeling away. But it’s a good choice for this book. Here is a single battle, a focused and pitched event.

Courtemanche captures in detail the humiliating deterioration of the father from rigid Parkinson’s. It’s never a sympathetic portrayal, but it is complete. When he still had power, father was haughty, “like Caesar in the Asterix books.” He was a man who fell asleep in front of the television every night since 1954. An autodidact, he could never be wrong, especially if challenged by his educated children. When André goes on to a career in theatre, he recognizes that his absurd conversations with his father resemble something out of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano.

A book has only a finite space in which to draw a character, and because Courtemanche has made the choice to portray André’s siblings in black and white, there’s more space to dedicate to the figure of the living, breathing, functional, spiteful, drooling father. He is hateful and pathetic, and brought to life so well I’m willing to forgive Courtemanche the strange insistent way he keeps comparing André’s father to not only Stalin but Duplessis as well. (“The little father of the Soviet people was the most dangerous man in the world. The most dangerous man in my world, however, was my father.”) How evil can one suburban Quebecois man get?

And so what of the good death? Do even self-aggrandizing tyrants who have cowed their families into submission deserve one? Being kept alive while being denied life’s pleasures is never humane, André and his nephew argue. “We don’t kill the people we love without asking their permission,” says André’s mother in return. “Even if we think we’re doing them a favour.”

Where do you go after Kigali? Bigger or smaller? Maybe both. Courtemanche has confronted one of the largest questions we can ask in one of the smallest confines imaginable. The setting might be blandly suburban, but his treatment is honest, painful, flawed at points, but rewarding in its intense and narrow focus. Who else in Canada is writing about such serious topics with such serious energy? This is an important book in what I hope will be a long list of novels from Courtemanche.