Montreal-born Jacques Renaud burst upon the literary scene of French-speaking Quebec at the age of twenty-one. Two years earlier, in 1962, his small book of poems, Electrodes, had been published without attracting much attention, but with the novel Le Cassé (cassé means figuratively in Quebec French what broke means in English--without money, down and out), he became the leading exponent of a new, scandalous, and significant phenomenon in Quebec literature--the joual syndrome.

The term joual has been used erroneously and insultingly to signify the colloquial language of French-speaking Quebeckers. The word itself is a deformation of the standard French cheval and can still be heard in rural areas of the province. Since Jean-Paul Desbiens, in his Les Insolences du Frère Untel (1960), gave the term currency by employing it to attack the education system and the resulting poor quality of spoken French in Quebec, joual has...