Gaétan Soucy sets his masterful, award-winning Vaudeville! in New York City just before the great crash of 1929, a time when the city was carved and moulded to make way for the towers that epitomize North American wealth and power.
Xavier X. Mortanse is an apprentice demolition worker who claims to be an immigrant from Hungary. We meet him just after he falls into a hole—the beginning of many bizarre humiliations he endures as our baffled, bruised, and somewhat unlikely hero.
Suddenly in possession of a singing frog but no job, Xavier is hired on vaudeville, where violence and ugliness blend cartoonishly with comedy and music in a strange and brilliant tumult. Vaudeville! is an enchanted tale on the scale of New York itself, overflowing with puzzles and horrors, towering icons of the cinema and the chessboard, and the always lurking threats of eviction, poverty, and disease.
Nobody in this fascinating tableau is who he or she appears—especially Xavier, who is, as his mother aptly puts it, “too many people and no one.” And yet Xavier, like other great literary heroes, becomes all of us as he struggles with others, with his past, and with his uncertain place in a world teeming with violence, fear, and, despite it all, love.
Soucy puts his finger on the precise time and place where the individual and community give way to the wrecking ball force of industry and its constant sidekick, corruption.
Vaudeville! is one of the purest accounts of mental pain, human solitude, and the stupor of existence ever fathomed. Soucy’s inventive language, delightful humour, and ingenious foreshadowing of calamity make this unforgettable novel impossible to put down.

(Text: House of Anansi Press)