It’s always wise, reading Yves Beauchemin, the best-selling Québécois author, to keep your eye on the big picture. In perhaps his best known novel, The Alley Cat, Beauchemin demonstrated an affinity for the Dickensian saga, for storytelling on a grand scale even when it was achieved at the expense of the telling detail, the careful psychological insight. Beauchemin is not what you’d call a subtle writer and his new novel, Second Fiddle, is just the latest proof of that.

Still, this time it seemed like readers might be in for some psychological nuance after all. Second Fiddle opens with the protagonist Nicholas Rivard, travelling from Montreal to Quebec City to visit his dying friend, the famous novelist Francois Durivage. But Nicholas, a self-confessed hack who once entertained his own literary dreams, gets to the hospital too late. Instead, he hears from the man’s widow that Francois wanted Nicholas to go back to serious writing and fulfill his youthful potential.

In the hands of another novelist, this premise would provide an interesting, if somewhat pedestrian, opportunity for a mid-life re-evaluation. When Nicholas has sex with his late friend’s wife, the reader might also be excused for feeling we are going to learn a lot more about what kind of man Nicholas is.
But that’s not the case here. In Beauchemin’s hands, the death and the affair are just excuses to write about Nicholas going a little haywire, having the obligatory mid-life crisis, becoming involved in a caper to uncover a government scandal, beginning an unlikely affair with a woman half his age, and finally campaigning to win his estranged wife back.

Beauchemin has an affinity for big casts of colourful secondary characters. There’s Nicholas’s scheming uncle who clings to life with the tenacity of Rasputin, the young hustler Hot Dog who is trying to straighten out his life, and Nicholas’s mistress, with the unfortunate nickname of Tweety, who succumbs to Nicholas’s charms.

The problem is Nicholas doesn’t have any discernible charms. He is crude and unpleasant. A character doesn’t have to behave admirably to be sympathetic, quite the contrary in fact, but he should at least be imaginative about choosing his sins. Or maybe he should be more interested than Nicholas in understanding his reasons for committing them.

None of Nicholas’s motives are delved into very deeply or explained satisfactorily. The subplot about his attempt to expose a corrupt politician offers no suspense and not much point to the story. It happens and Beauchemin moves on.

The same is true of Nicholas’s decision to change careers and of his affair with Tweety. Frankly, the only reason I could see why this very attractive young woman would fall for Beauchemin’s middle-aged hero is because Beauchemin needed to keep the plot churning along. The more I read of Second Fiddle the more I got the feeling that Beauchemin was just throwing plot points against the wall in the hope that some of them would stick. Regrettably, most don’t.