After the Red Night, the latest novel by Quebec author Christiane Frenette, opens with brief “gesture drawings” of its five characters three nights after Rimouski’s “la nuit rouge” in May 1950, when fire devastated half the city. These quick sketches include: the remote, puzzling Marie; her soon-to-be husband Romain, newly returned from medical school; his childhood friend Thomas, whose erratic behaviour lands him in an asylum; Joe, an ambitious boy in Illinois; and a curious pre-birth reference to Marie’s fourth child, Lou.

From there, Frenette proceeds to embellish and link these tableaux – the first three in the year 1955, the last two nearly five decades later. Moving back and forth among them, Frenette assembles aspects of her characters’ inner histories and relationships to reveal people who are unable to entirely decipher or escape their own sense of isolation and disappointment.

Interpreting the landscape of these lives is a challenge. In two of Frenette’s previous books – the novel Terra Firma and the story collection The Woman Who Walks on Glass – she employs second-person narration or nameless characters as a means of distancing the reader. After the Red Night takes the opposite approach, stepping closer and gaining intimacy, but its surfaces continue to conceal elusive emotional depths. This is by no means a flaw; in fact, the ambiguity is part of the book’s appeal.

Sheila Fischman’s translation employs a poetic, bare-bones style, which amplifies Frenette’s theme of the impossibility of knowing anyone or anything with certainty. Truth is ultimately elusive; the only choice available to us is to trust in our limited knowledge.

After the Red Night is a stylistic treat. It offers a subtle rendering of the self’s paradoxical mysteries and of our attempts to escape the things that make us who we are.