In 1978 Tremblay abandoned the dramatic form and published La Grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte, the first novel of his proposed trilogy, Chroniques du plateau Mont-Royal. In effect a continuation of the cycle of Les Belles Soeurs, with a similar decor, language, and some of the same characters, seen now as children, this trilogy here offers its second volume, Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges. As in the preceding novel, one notes the use of short récits, dialogues in joual, biting caricatures, and the fantastic. One also meets again Albertine, sister-in-law of la grosse femme, although the emphasis is now on her daughter, Thérèse, and on her friends.

Thérèse et Pierrette is prefaced by a significant quotation from John Irving's The World According to Garp on the preference for imagining rather than remembering. Tremblay's novel, however, is a successful...